Investing in the future adds up for sales master.

It's hard to imagine, considering the current frenzied climate of real estate investment, but there was a time when real estate as an asset class was closer to being considered a black sheep by the investment community than a darling.

Benjamin V. Lambert, chairman and founder of Eastdil Realty--the first real estate investment banking firm--played a pivotal role in spurring commercial property's transformation into a premiere asset class.

Founding Eastdil in 1967, a time when the capital markets understood far less about real estate as an investment vehicle than they do today, Lambert fused his panache for brokering with a deep knowledge of how to determine and yield value from commercial property, justify its pricing, and structure and secure financing for its purchase. His work legitimized the asset class in the eyes of lenders and investors alike and also helped usher in its introduction as an attractive securitized instrument in the form of REITs.

"My whole concept in '67 was to create a company that could act on behalf of corporations and would better understand the brick and mortar that those corporations showed on their balance sheet and at the same time could play the role of representing people involved specifically in real estate and real estate development," Lambert said in explaining his significant contributions to the genesis of the business.

"We would help to exposit to the capital markets the economics of real estate because they didn't know much about it.

"We could play two roles that would allow us to focus on two very valuable commodities: real estate and capital. And so everything we do here has to do with real estate and capital."

Today, representing usually the seller in sales transactions, Lambert is still known for his mastery of tapping the capital markets and for possessing an uncanny value finding ability in property that has consistently allowed him to realize the most attractive pricing for his clients and make Eastdil the biggest name in investment sales in New York City.

While the job of realizing value in a sale has become easier as real estate has been inundated with an unprecedented volume of capital, according to Lambert, he and the team of professionals at Eastdil continue to go over properties with a "tweezer" to find every nook of potential value and earnings potential. Whether it's air rights, a reworked ground lease, or revised earnings forecasts based on improving projections in fundamentals, Eastdil pioneered the practice of keying in on the essential facet of income for a property and using it as the fulcrum for realizing maximal pricing.

It's no wonder Lambert and the firm have been charged consistently with handling the trade of some of the city's biggest trophy assets. In 2003, he represented the GM Building's former owner, Conseco, in the disposition of that property to current owner, Harry Macklowe, in a record-setting and headline-making $1.4 billion transaction.

2004, the most prolific year to date for investment sales in Manhattan, was no letdown from the firm's big deals of 2003 and marked yet another year Eastdil was the market leader in the Manhattan.

Now in 2005, interest rates promise to finally rise from historically rock bottom levels and pricing could consequently level off or perhaps even slightly recede, but regardless of the potential resultant market fluctuations, Lambert still expects the firm to continue on its streak of prolific success and handle deals in all segments of the business, from retail, to office to residential.

"2004 was a remarkably strong year for us," Lambert said. "For many clients this continues to be a period where they're anxious to go to the capital markets either to sell or create joint ventures or do financing, so I think that 2005 will be a year not unlike 2004 in terms of its profitability and volume."

While Lambert helped define what types of skills and services an investment sales broker ought to offer, he says that at the start of his career in real estate he surprisingly knew precious little about finance--a discipline he wound up fusing in landmark fashion with brokering.

Beginning his career in real estate at Hurt & Co. arranging mortgages for motels in New Jersey, Lambert says he came in without even knowing what amortization meant.

An art history major at Brown University--where he was also president of the student body and president of his fraternity--Lambert made up for his lack of financial training by displaying impressive creativity, leadership, intelligence, drive and ambition. These traits were quickly noticed by rising real estate moguls of the day, Trammell Crow and Al Taubman, both of whom began to covet Lambert's burgeoning mortgaging skills.

"They saw me as someone who was very eager to be successful and to do big things," Lambert said. "I became close to them and did an enormous amount of financing for their deals and did their mortgages. These guys were going to be big, but I was flying by the seat of my pants, learning a lot as I went along. It was a very exciting time."

One skill Lambert didn't have to focus on sharpening was his salesmanship. Before he had gone to Hurt & Co., and just after graduating from Brown, he had worked for textile manufacturer Burlington Company as a door-to-door salesman of surplus fabric. It was a somewhat grueling and humbling job, but demonstrated his amazing ability to show good humor and charm in the face of adversity.

"I started out going to upholstery and furniture stores on the lower Eastside and in Brooklyn lugging two forty pound suitcases full of fabrics," Lambert said. "I can't tell you how many places would kick you out. It was tough, but it was like a trial by fire in sales, it really instilled in me the qualities necessary for success in that arena and which were essential to my future success."

After quickly ascending through the ranks at Burlington, entering into senior management after little more than a year, Lambert decided to switch to real estate because he perceived it as an industry with an infinitely higher ceiling for professional growth. Hurt & Co. gave him his start, but working with the likes of Crow and Taubman, Lambert quickly started to formulate his own ideas of what the real estate brokering and investment business could become.

His education in a discipline outside of finance and business only helped hatch his vision, Lambert says, because it freed him from any restrictions imposed by previous precedents or practices of how investment banking and real estate had previously been conducted.

"I had the desire to look at things differently," Lambert said. "I hadn't been so indoctrinated that I couldn't see some very interesting possibilities for the business and how to take things to the next level. I looked at the way investment banking on Wall Street was done and I said 'Why can't we bring that to real estate?'"

Lambert formed Eastdil when he was only 27, offering all kinds of sophisticated investment opportunities in real estate that quickly rocketed him to major success brokering deals and arranging the financing for major real estate acquisitions and development. But he always envisioned selling an equity portion of the firm to a corporate partner with whom he could share a synergism and reap even-more success.

"I sold so many assets for other people throughout my whole career that I figured it was only fair that I sold an asset of my own for a change," Lambert joked.

After a rotating cast of partners throughout the 70s and early 80s, Lambert caught on early to the trend of rising international institutional investment in Manhattan in the mid-1980s and organized a partnership with Japanese firm, Nomura Securities Co. Ltd, the world's largest securities company at the time.

Closely allied with Nomura, he brokered not only the mammoth firm's plethora of real estate transactions, but placed in excess of $5.2 billion, including private equity with Japanese, European and Asian investors, syndicated limited partnership investments, structured convertible and participating mortgages, and securitized and Euro-bond placements.

It was a masterstroke, but Nomura hit hard times in the mid 90s and Lambert eventually had to buy out their interest. He didn't fly solo for long and, in 1999, sold a stake to current majority holder, Wells Fargo Bank, which, as the nation's leading real estate lender, compliments perfectly Eastdil's long history of arranging financing.

Active in many philanthropic endeavors outside of real estate, including the Boy Scouts of America, Lambert's main focus has been the Harlem Day Charter School which he founded and helped finance with personal funds in 2001. Crediting his own educational background with providing him with the resources to achieve major success, Lambert has long been involved with supporting facilities that provide high quality education to underprivileged children.

The Harlem Day Charter School represents his latest and perhaps most impressive efforts in this arena. It is a high quality and ever-growing elementary school for children in both Harlem and throughout the city, focused on providing its students with the educational foundation and motivation to realize their potential.

"Creativity is something that can spread from business to pleasure," Lambert said. "I'm still very much involved in art and what creativity that I get from that I use in the business world. This school very much harnesses its students' creativity, and they'll be able to take that creativity and apply it to something else and maybe really realize success for themselves like I did.

"Creativity is interchangeable, it's not just locked to one facet or area in life and if you use it you can realize your dreams."