NJIT Overseer Paul Profeta Ranks Highly in Real Estate 'Power 50'

Paul V. Profeta, founder of the Roseland-based real estate investment company and namesake of NJIT’s Paul Profeta Real Estate Technology, Design and Innovation Center, placed in the No. 3 spot in NJBIZ’s Commercial Real Estate Power 50 rankings.

In its annual list, NJBIZ characterizes Profeta as a “heavy hitter … where his insights on business, commercial real estate and economic development also ensure greater economic opportunity for residents.”

Profeta’s drive to provide education and opportunity is evident both regionally and right here at NJIT. The Profeta Real Estate Center serves as the locus of research, teaching and training related to disruptive technologies innovations and novel design, service, management techniques that are actively transforming the real estate field.

Housed in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, and drawing on the expertise, experience and interests of faculty members from across the university, the center offers new academic programs in real estate technology, provides executive education, organizes conferences, symposia and workshops, and supports cutting edge research in the changing ways in which real estate is traded, used and managed.

The center’s transdisciplinary research activities focus on the use of technology and innovation, new ways of design and innovative business models with a special focus on the application of information technology and platform economics to real estate markets, also known as property technology, or PropTech.

The center at NJIT is the third such academic real estate center established by Profeta. The first was at Columbia Business School in New York City in 1980, and the second was the Rutgers Center for Real Estate in Newark. Profeta also endowed the Paul V. Profeta Chair of Real Estate at Rutgers. 

In addition to the real estate center, Profeta also established the Paul V. Profeta Foundation, Inc. Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which fuels NJIT’s efforts to support women and minority businesses and economic growth at the university and in its home city of Newark.

Both centers were launched last year through a transformational donation from Profeta – the single largest individual gift in NJIT’s history.