Weiss charts a course to development success.

Ted Weiss likens developing an office project to captaining a boat.

"Building a building is no different than setting off on a cruise," said Weiss, president of Melville-based T. Weiss Realty Corp. "You have to plan correctly, prepare your vessel, do your safety procedures, check all your mechanical and electrical equipment, chart your course and prepare for any uncertainty." Similarly, he said, you have to plan carefully when undertaking a development project.

A boater with 30 years experience and the recent recipient of a captain's license from the Coast Guard, Weiss, 58, this year plans to take his 48-foot Sea Ray Sedan Bridge motor yacht across Florida's Okeechobee Waterway and cruise the Sunshine State's Gulf Coast for the first time.

At home on Long Island, Weiss is preparing to embark on a 109,500 s/ f, $25-million, Class-A office project in Melville's bustling Route 110 corporate corridor.

Weiss' specialty is redeveloping undervalued, under-utilized properties into prime office space. His newest Cinderella makeover involves transforming a 1960's era warehouse into a contemporary office building that will serve as a highly visible, four-story, and glass and stone corporate billboard for vehicles streaking down the Long Island Expressway. The new building will be known as the Melville Corporate Center III.

The building, awaiting final approvals, will be Weiss' fourth in Melville, where the developer has been active. His efforts in the area were recognized earlier this year by the Route 110 Redevelopment Corp., which named him its Businessman of the Year for 2005.

Unlike many office developers on Long Island, Weiss is a first generation landlord who entered the business later in life. The Brooklyn-born developer was a physical education teacher, first in Patchogue and later in Copiague, after graduating from Southern Connecticut State College, where he met his wife, the former Pamela Bendix. But a teacher's salary wasn't enough to support a newly married couple, so Weiss supplemented his income by working as a commercial carpet cleaner. Carpeting was something new to Weiss, who grew up in housing project in Brooklyn's East New York section, where he attended Thomas Jefferson High School. "Everyone had tile floors," he recalled.

Carpet cleaning soon proved to be more lucrative than teaching and Weiss turned to his new craft full time, eventually branching into selling carpets and floor coverings. In 1974, Weiss got his first taste of commercial real estate, buying 569 Broadway in Massapequa, a 2,200-square-foot property, which he completely renovated for his carpeting business.

His residential and commercial TeeDee Carpets business prospered as he covered the floors of 900 new homes annually during the 1980s on Long Island. As the carpeting business grew, "we continued to out grow our locations," Weiss said. Weiss bought new sites, but never sold. "Rather than sell the buildings, I recycled them," he said.

By 1986, Weiss' flooring business was flourishing and his real estate portfolio had grown. "We oversold our capacity. It was very busy. Very crazy."

Then, the stock market crashed and the housing market soon followed. The flooring business evaporated. Weiss had five buildings and two showrooms--all mortgaged. "I was funding the company about $30,000 a month."

He soon put the carpeting business behind him and turned to real estate full time. "I've always been passionate about real estate," said Weiss, admitting that he is a deal junkie at heart. "To me the deal is everything," he said, "The money doesn't generate my enthusiasm. It's getting the deal done."

It wasn't until 1996, however, that Weiss made his foray into the sizzling Melville office market. That year, he purchased 532 Broadhollow Rd., a former tool plant that had been converted into Class A offices, from a bank that had foreclosed on the 82,000-square foot property.

In the years that followed, Weiss acquired a modern office building in Hauppauge, 2150 Joshua's Path, and in 2001 began his efforts to convert Melville's old industrial stock into modern office space. He bought 105 Maxess Road, a former bakery that he converted into 149,000 square feet of offices.

Dubbed the Melville Corporate Center I, he leased space to such well-known tenants as Agilent, NIC Components, Crawford & Co., and Polytechnic University.

In 2003, he followed with the acquisition of a former warehouse at 330 S. Service Road in Melville and fashioned that into 85,000 square of Class-A offices called Melville Corporate Center II. With the space fully leased within 18 months, a restless and emboldened Weiss was planning Melville Corporate Center III next door at 330 S. Service Road, solidifying his reputation as a key player in Melville.

Today, T. Weiss Realty owns and manages more than 600,000 s/f of offices on Long Island. Weiss says he offers Class A space--without the chandeliers and the granite--at Class B rents.

"He's established his own niche in a market that had been dominated by guys who had been in the market a lot longer than him," said Robert Gladitsch, a mortgage banker at the Long Island firm M. Robert Goldman & Co., who has arranged financing for Weiss' projects for a decade. "He's stayed true to his roots. He's focused properties with more upside. He looks for a much more of an explosive return."

And as he has scaled up in both size and quality Weiss has continued to work with many of the same vendors he had worked with for years--lawyers, contractors, architects and bankers.

Among them: architect, Robert Tast, now of the Riverhead-based firm, Young & Young, who has worked with the developer since Weiss renovated his first building in 1975.

"He's very demanding," said Tast. "He's fair and honest, though."