Why We Hire From the Neighborhoods We Invest In

Knowing the neighborhood is part of the job

A real estate background helps in this business. So does knowing the neighborhood.

Plenty of real estate companies now run fully remote, with teams spread across the country underwriting properties they’ll never see. Leverage Companies works the other way. All six of our departments sit on one floor at 50 Park Place in Newark, and most of our people live in the areas where we lend, buy and operate.

Local knowledge doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet

Someone who grew up in Newark or nearby in Essex County knows things no data feed will tell you:

• Which streets flood after a heavy rain.
• Which blocks have parking, and which ones tenants avoid because of it.
• What a two-family on a given corner actually rents for, compared with what a listing says it should.
• Which neighborhoods are changing, and how fast.

That knowledge makes the work better. An acquisitions team that knows the block prices a house more accurately. A lender that knows the street can tell whether a rent estimate is realistic. An operations team that knows the neighborhood can find a good contractor or a reliable tenant faster.

That kind of knowledge takes years to build from the outside. Someone who grew up here brings it on day one.

Local hiring keeps the money in the city

Hiring locally is also part of how the firm invests in New Jersey. Salaries paid to people who live here get spent here, at local businesses, on local rent and on local services.

We want everything the firm does to add to New Jersey’s economy, and that includes giving people from the neighborhoods we work in a real career in the industry that shapes them.

Where local knowledge pays off across the floor

Each of the six departments uses what its people know about the area in its own way:

• Acquisitions prices houses block by block, so knowing which streets hold their value shapes every offer.
• Underwriting checks whether a rent estimate and a repair budget are realistic for that street.
• Processing keeps closings on schedule, which goes faster with people who know the local attorneys, title companies and town offices.
• Dispositions sells finished properties, and knows what buyers in each neighborhood are looking for.
• Marketing talks to homeowners and investors in the words they actually use.
• Technology builds the tools the other five run on, and works best sitting right next to the people using them.

We hire experience, and we train for it too

We’re always looking for strong, experienced people in real estate, lending and finance. We also hire people from parallel careers and teach them the real estate side.

If you’ve done analysis, sales or operations in another industry, you already have most of what these jobs need:

• Analysts know how to build a model and check someone else’s numbers.
• Salespeople know how to earn trust and follow up until something closes.
• Operations people know how to keep a process moving when five things go wrong at once.

The real estate part can be taught, and we’re happy to teach it.

New hires learn every part of the business

When every department sits in one room, new hires learn quickly. You hear how a deal moves from first call to closing, because every team that touches it is within earshot.

You can walk over and ask what a renovation down the street from your new acquisition actually cost. You can ask the lending team why a file got held up. Here, those answers take a few minutes.

New hires also see how decisions get made. Leadership sits on the same floor, so a question about why the firm passed on a deal or changed a process gets answered by the people who made the call.

A lot of the roles at Leverage Companies started the same way. One person took on a problem nobody owned, solved it, and the solution grew into a whole department.

Join the team

If you want to work on the same floor as the people making the decisions, Leverage Companies may be your next chapter. Open roles are on our careers page.