BY TASNEEM PAGHDIWALA In 1950, the parents of Mark Davis L’75 purchased a home in the tree-lined West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia for $8,000. The family decided to move in 1970, so they put the house on the market and sold it for $8,500. Witnessing this transaction, the young Mark Davis did the math and found himself rather unimpressed. He reasoned that a net profit of five hundred dollars over a twenty-year period left something to be desired and, somehow, he sensed that he could do better. Both literally and figuratively, Davis has come a long way from the residential real estate market of his childhood neighborhood. In fact, his then-budding interest in development eventually transported him outside the continental United States altogether, landing him among the white beaches, high-peaked mountains and thriving real estate arena of Puerto Rico in the late 1980s. After graduating from Penn Law in 1975, Davis took a position with Dechert Price & Rhoads (now Dechert LLP) in Philadelphia. Dechert, then primarily a corporate law firm, afforded little opportunity to practice real estate law, so Davis departed for the warmer climes of Miami in 1976, where he joined the real estate group of Greenberg, Traurig. There he represented a number of Florida’s major condominium and Planned Unit Developers (PUD). In 1984, as he was lecturing on real estate law around the country, he was asked to open the firm’s first branch office in West Palm Beach. It was also in that year that he married his wife, Yoly Villamil. |
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