Reinvention And Resilience In Real Estate Development With Diego Hodara (Podcast)

Diego Hodara is the founder and CEO of Titanium Realty Group, a real estate investment and development company focused on mixed-use and residential assets in transit-oriented markets across the New York metropolitan area. Titanium Realty Group has close to 2,000 units under development or completed in Jersey City, NJ, and Port Chester, NY, representing more than $800 million in total project value. Diego holds a master's degree in Real Estate Finance and Investment from NYU, as well as degrees in Architecture, Urban Planning, and an MBA from the University of Uruguay.

The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss

Insights from Diego Hodara on Reinvention and Resilience in Real Estate Development

When Diego Hodara arrived in the United States from Uruguay at 30, he had an architecture degree and construction know-how, but no network, no capital, and no work visa. He started over selling kitchen cabinets and managing renovations across New York's boroughs, learning how the city actually gets built. During the recession, he bought his first property in Jersey City with his own savings. It went underwater almost immediately. Instead of walking away, he held on, managed it himself, and turned those mistakes into lessons.

That discipline became the foundation for Titanium Realty Group. Diego scaled methodically from fix-and-flips to 30-unit buildings to high-rise developments, proving he could execute at each level before raising the stakes. Without family wealth or institutional backing, he had no room for error. He grew slowly, questioned every assumption, and reinvested everything into the next deal.

In this episode of The Dealmakers' Edge, Aaron and Diego discuss starting over at 30 with nothing, scaling from two-family homes to high-rise developments without losing discipline, and the guiding principle that's shaped everything Diego has built—don't try to be the biggest, try to be the strongest.

1:28 — Moving from Uruguay to the U.S. at 30 and starting over without a network

4:42 — Selling kitchen cabinets and managing renovations across New York City

8:05 — Early lessons in construction, financing, and navigating a new market

10:56 — Buying his first property in Jersey City and surviving the downturn

14:23 — Building confidence through experience and small-scale development

18:00 — Founding Titanium Realty Group and committing to deliberate growth

21:17 — From two-family homes to high-rise projects and institutional credibility

24:50 — Managing risk and questioning assumptions before every new deal

28:36 — The importance of discipline when working with investors' money

31:45 — Expanding into preferred equity, bridge lending, and conversions

34:20 — What it means to build strength—not size—in development

Transcript

A.Y. Strauss: You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. Today, we're really excited to have a conversation with Diego Hodara, who is the founder and CEO of Titanium Realty Group, a real estate investment and development company focused on mixed-use and residential real estate assets in the New York metro area, focusing on Jersey City, also more recently in Port Chester, New York.

In this conversation, we're going to hear about Diego's transition to the U.S. after growing up in Uruguay and coming over to this country with no contacts, no money, no relationships, and really building himself up from the ground up here. It's an exciting story to follow. He's a master of reinvention. He's grown from doing small projects in Jersey City to very large ones. You're going to hear about his thinking, how he's trying to always stay one step ahead of the curve, and how he's thinking about the development market today. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and we'll dive right in.

Today, I'm really excited to be joined by a good friend of mine who I go way back with, Diego Hodara. I think we met 15 years ago at this point, maybe 12. It's all a blur, but I've really watched you develop personally, professionally, as a developer, and you've had a remarkable career to date. I think our listeners will be really excited to get to hear your story and know about your projects and everything you've been up to.

So maybe we'll start from the beginning. You have an interesting background. You did not grow up in this country. You came here pretty young. You really built yourself up pretty fast. So maybe we could talk about just a few minutes where you grew up, how you grew up, and your earlier years before we get to your real estate career.

Diego Hodara: Well, thank you, Aaron, first of all, for having me in your podcast. Yes, we know each other for almost 15 years when I was just doing fix and flips in Jersey City. But I think I didn't come that young when I came from Uruguay. I actually think I came a little bit late because I was 30 years old.

By 30, you are in the peak of your productive professional life. I had to start from the very beginning. It was a little bit of sometimes challenging—well, always challenging—but frustration when you would compare and say, "Well, when I left in Uruguay, as a professional there you could be a little bit more patient and continue through this growth, professional, economical growth," and then making many steps backwards coming to the U.S., which is, you know, for me was different language, different, I mean, no network at all. I didn't know anybody. I wasn't even with a working visa. I came with a tourist visa and then I found a job and then, you know, formally got an H-1B visa and eventually the green card and so forth.

So I think at 30, I was actually the guy who would be even leaving the coach, right? Because I had to become better and more fluent in English, express myself better. There was no ChatGPT that would correct your letters. So anyway, that's the path. I started in Chicago and immediately after in New York.

Slowly growing through work, first in selling kitchen cabinets and high-end furniture, and doing all the renovations. Eventually, then I moved to working for a developer doing a lot of work in Ramada. I was like a construction manager working in Brooklyn and the Bronx. I learned a lot about all those boroughs across, I mean, I was able to—today I have a very good knowledge of the four or five boroughs. You know, Staten Island is limited for me, but I know very well the other four boroughs, every corner of them.

I was with a car. They gave me a car, and I was in every single neighborhood doing construction management. Eventually, I got my green card, and that was during the recession time. That's when I started three things. Actually, during the recession time, it was very productive for me. Because I had the green card, I went to get a master's degree in NYU.

I was able to get a student loan because I didn't have the money to pay the tuition of NYU. But I got a student loan. So I was studying. At the same time, I was providing construction service, like fit-out work, working commercial renovations, apartment renovations, offices. The third was like fix-and-flips that I started in Jersey City. I think later on, we met at one of the dinners and networking events.

A.Y. Strauss: Exactly. I will say, during your time in Uruguay, you did have real estate training. I mean, it wasn't U.S. training—obviously, it was tailored for your upbringing in your country—but you had an architectural background, urban planning background. You worked on real projects. So while you had to learn a language and retool, real estate was already in your blood at that point. So it wasn't a new concept. It had to be reimagined, right?

So that training and to come over with nothing and to, I think in 2006, when you started buying your first properties in Jersey City, those smaller properties and started acquiring them, right? Around those years.

Diego Hodara: Yes, because I was very naive and I wanted to make the American dream buying my first home. During the subprime, you would put 5%. I entered into that type of wave and bought with 5%, my first two-family house with very limited credit score. At that time, I think it was just two years in the U.S.

Yeah, I had to hold it because I couldn't flip it. Market crashed and I was actually negatively cash-flowing. I was asking myself, "What do I do? I came to this country and now I own a liability instead of assets." I questioned myself, "Well, I give the keys back to the bank and walk away and go back to Uruguay?"

I decided we will find this. Eventually, it will get better. So I managed the property myself because I didn't have the resources to outsource the management or the rentals. Eventually, I was able to weather the storm. During the times of 2009, 2010, I was buying again. That property, I sold it later. I did well. I was bleeding for quite some time, but I did well because I believed in that market and that emerging market I was investing into.

But that's the prospect. My base in terms of the asset that I came with in the U.S. was know-how of architecture, urban planning, and construction. That is true.

A.Y. Strauss: I wonder if we do like a Harvard case study in 50 years from now, if it turns out that Diego's two-family purchase in 2006 wasn't the first ripple or trigger of the great financial crisis. Perhaps you may have started it with that one acquisition in the subprime market.

But all kidding aside, through that "painful" experience, taking that risk, you were thankfully able to learn at a smaller scale. You really took those lessons to heart and developed. And that grittiness and having to perform—you had no safety net.

I know in those subsequent years, 2010, 2012, 2013, you bought more and more. Your confidence grew. The market grew. Your name grew. Your reputation. I've seen you on a job site. I've seen you speaking fluent Spanish. I've seen you pointing out problems. I've seen you really understanding every inch, every spec, every nook and cranny of your developments to know where the challenges are and how to be in front of them. Then fast forward a few years, you started moving on to bigger projects from there.

Diego Hodara: Yes, it's important. Real estate development is very complex. You are required to know a lot of trades, a lot of parts of this industry. The way I saw it was, okay, I have good knowledge in design. I can read plans. I know when things are not coordinated between architectural, MEPs, structural engineer, which are key to avoid later on change orders, right?

Moreover, when we are talking about 20-story buildings, like we did on 413 Summit or 28 stories in 425 Summit, you need to have a very good construction documentation. We are able to catch those problems way ahead of time so we avoid later on during the construction the problems that are because of bad coordination.

Then I was very into boots on the ground in construction, not only in Uruguay, but also working for this developer as a construction manager. You're right. I put hands on.

Speaking Spanish is great when you are involved in construction because it's a strong Hispanic community involved in the construction industry. What I did think I was lacking during the recession time was finance. That's why I went to NYU to take a master's in real estate finance. I actually didn't focus on development. I was more in finance because I wanted to get involved in that. So then you can speak clearly and intelligently with investors, with lenders, in the capital market side.

A.Y. Strauss: 100%. You went from doing those smaller projects to more scale where everything had—not only the buildings got bigger—but the capital stack got more complicated. You had to present as a fiduciary of other people's capital versus, "Here's my money, here's my return," and you had to develop yourself.

So one common theme I've seen with you is you keep making investments, whether it's buying a property, buying a parcel of land, going through entitlement, seeing what could be in three, five, seven years, but also in yourself—your education from the beginning, the language skills, the studies and classes, the contacts—and your network has really grown too. You've really developed a nice reputation with so many people that trust you now versus before when you were literally meeting people for the first time.

So over those years, those projects have developed. Maybe we could talk about just—maybe there are some people listening here who are working on smaller projects and then they're looking to make that leap. Sometimes you may not feel ready for that leap. You know, you did the 390-unit building in Jersey City with a complicated JV with real capital, major capital partners, etc. But there are some people that can't take that next step from those smaller projects.

How did you ever feel? I know you never feel ready, but maybe you could talk about that transition where you built up the confidence to say, "Let's swing a little bigger. Let's go bolder." I know it was gradual, of course, but those leaps of faith—and I think this is The Dealmakers' Edge Podcast—sometimes you have to conquer your own mind. What did you start telling yourself when you started to scale to the bigger projects?

Diego Hodara: Yeah, so I think for me, the first part is be patient because it takes time to grow, at least in our industry. We are not in the tech world that we can scale from a garage startup, and then two years later, you are close to a unicorn-type company. Real estate is a very different way of growing the business, so you need to be patient.

That's something I didn't have as a skill. That's why actually I didn't wait to get out of the recession in Uruguay. I decided to start over my career, my professional career, my life in the U.S. So patience was key for me to, okay, I know I have to grow from one house to many houses to then to small ground-up development and then bigger ground-up development projects.

Because there is a whole know-how and the learning curve—as a typical learning curve—it takes time at the beginning until you get to that inflection point where you really start learning very fast in a short period of time. That is with the real estate world. Moreover, when you are in development, if you are in the pure capital markets, well, that's one thing. Or if you are only doing construction. But when you are doing development, you are like the director of an orchestra.

You're dealing with so many parties, and you need to be close to expert in each side of the development. When I understood that, okay, that's the first thing. So I will start small because I don't have an uncle. I don't have the padrino, right? The godfather. I don't have anybody to give me money to start big from the first day. I didn't have.

I had to use my own savings while living in a walk-up building, saving every penny so I could put my first down payment on that two-family house, right? So I didn't have options. I had to save a lot of money, live frugal, and reinvest every savings into something constantly bigger and bigger and bigger.

When I went to the new phase of doing a lot of fix and flips between 2009 and 2012, I already had the experience, as you mentioned, of two-family house that I bought in 2006. I learned the mistakes from them. So it was successful three years that, okay, I made a mistake with my own money. When I started raising capital from others, I made sure I wouldn't make the same mistake.

Moreover, having money from other investors—and we were very successful—at some point I had like 50 of them at the same time, flipping and creating great returns to my investors, therefore getting good promotion for me. Then, to continue answering your question, I said, "Okay, now I have enough cushion of saving. Now I see there is a niche here. I have an investment thesis that makes a lot of sense for ground-up in a transit-oriented emerging market."

I started with 30 units. I didn't start with 300 units. I started with 30 units ground-up, a five-story building instead of a 20-story building. And if you see how we grew, it was over time. We weren't crazy about having my next building be a 20-story building from my five-story. No. Then I did the six stories with Jordan, then seven, then eleven or fourteen stories, and so forth.

That's the way I decided to grow and limit the mistakes, as you always make when you are doing things, to the minimum. So when you are bigger, you avoid making big mistakes because you already learned from smaller cases.

A.Y. Strauss: For sure. I know you work on nuanced programs with contractors to limit cost overruns and transparency on pricing. You definitely oversee all the trades very carefully, and you've navigated COVID and inflation and recession and zoning changes—and you name it, you've been through it.

So you need a real stomach for development, especially the type of development you're doing, where you're fighting tooth and nail for every single thing every day. It's very urban. It's super competitive. Every block in Jersey City at this point has thousands of people focused on it and what's coming up and where it's going.

You really saw Jersey City way back when. You traversed the five boroughs and you developed—

Diego Hodara: That was 2006.

A.Y. Strauss: So you saw that market emerging way before it became a big market. I mean, you were really long on it really early. That must have just come from your ability to see beyond and continue to invest beyond the horizon.

I'm wondering, now that you're at this stage—you've done a lot of real development projects, significant projects, substantial partners—it's obviously a challenging time for development, we'll say that. Maybe you can categorize the way you feel today in this market, even with all your experience and capital behind you and contacts, etc., versus, say, when you were starting out.

How does it feel today? Do you feel as if it's harder in many ways? Is it easier? You can't fight the market—obviously, the market's going to do what it is—but maybe you can describe the general real feel as a developer in Jersey City today versus even three years ago?

Diego Hodara: First of all, we expanded beyond Jersey City. We also invested in some markets in Westchester. One of them is Port Chester. So we started diversifying in markets.

Now, to your question before that, I always follow through my strategy, through investment. If you see Titanium Realty Group, it has been more like a cluster approach. I always knew I was small compared to the big sharks of the New York metro area, right? Or generational companies with so much track record.

What would be my competitive advantage? My competitive advantage was, okay, I'm small, but I'm strong. I always say, I don't care. I don't want to be big. I want to be strong. That's my focus. So cluster approach was a strategy for me, whether in Port Chester, where we have 400 units to develop, or in Jersey City, where we have developed close to 1,000 and have another close to 1,000 units to develop.

That makes me stronger. It made me at least, maybe not stronger than other competitors out there, but strong enough to have a good presence and to have good connection with the community and the city officials. So that's one thing. Now, transit-oriented emerging markets within the metro area was my strategy.

It did make a lot of sense until, let's say, 2023. Why? Because before 2022, interest rates were very low, inflation was low, and actually in Jersey City, taxes and property taxes weren't the ones that are right now. They reassessed across the board.

For me, it was, okay, I have an expertise of building and ground up. It limits my market share because there are fewer competitors. There are plenty of those who do core investment or triple net type, or those who do value add, but not so many do ground up—and much less high-rise as we ended up building, right? So being in a high-rise ground-up development, you have less competition, and you become stronger in that respect when you are talking about a specific market that you're focusing on.

Now, the strategy made a lot of sense because I could build up-to-date, brand-new, class-A properties adjusted to the demand and free market deregulated rents. For me, value add didn't make sense at all. I had to deal with tenants, which I'd rather not do. I always say I'd rather deal with rock but not with tenants. I'd rather deal with environmental, not because I don't want to—we have a lot of tenants—but I never wanted to do value-add, trying to evict or push out existing tenants. That wasn't my goal.

Moreover, I remember I bought a property in Jersey City. It was a rent-regulated property at 9% cap. I saw the people. The people, all of them, were Hispanic, hardworking people. I left them there. I didn't push anybody. I just waited, and I sold the property at four and change cap. I didn't push anybody out. I just collected the rent, sold it, made a profit, and moved on. So my value-add type of strategy wasn't for me. I knew I was going to do something that would be up to date and deregulated.

That strategy, again, made a lot of sense because interest rates were low. Construction was not that high. I mean, it's stabilized right now, but we got a big jump over the last couple of years. So now it's tough. As you said, it's a tough market to do ground up. You need good basis, you need great location, and you need capital that is thinking in the long term.

So whether we have an opportunity zone, Port Chester is an opportunity zone, we have the best locations in terms of land in Port Chester. The way we are capitalized on all these deals—very or no loans in place on the land. So that's the way you have to adjust. You need to be very careful in how you are taking risks, whether the type of leverage that you're taking, the type of loans you are accepting, the type of equity you are accepting. That is what you need to be more careful about.

The other things we're doing—we are also starting to do other types of things, such as pref equity for other developers, or we're doing a bridge-to-per loan to other developers because we understand the developers and we were able to get funding from investors for that purpose. We can add value to the investors and to other developers. So that's another thing we are doing. We are happy to see the developers that we are invested into as lenders or pref equity become successful. So even our underwriting is very thorough because if we put the money, we want them to succeed as well.

A.Y. Strauss: Well said. I know you're a master of reinvention. So it sounds like exploring other product lines, if you will, other than traditional development—whether you're making loans, preferred equity deals, reinvesting capital in certain ways—you've come a long way with different chapters in your life. What do you think is the next chapter? How do you see yourself even further reinventing yourself now with all your accomplishments in this interesting market with all of its opportunities and challenges?

Diego Hodara: Well, there are other things. We are working on an office conversion to resi, where the bases are very low because of the unfortunate situation that the office market is going through. We have expertise in construction and design, and the office-to-resi has insane challenges—very important challenges. People who don't have experience there, they don't understand it from any point of view, the structure that is in place. Forget about the zoning regulation for a moment, right? Assuming you are able to convert to resi, there are other challenges—the floor plate, the light and air issues. But we do have experience.

By the way, even before building Titanium Realty Group the way it is today, as I was doing fix and flips, I was doing a lot of offices. You open and do renovations. You get the whole space, and it's like a Pandora's box, right? You enter and you find insane amounts of issues that you need to solve. So we went through it in the early stage as a contractor myself. So that's another avenue we are working on. We see a lot of momentum. We are working on one project right now that we see could happen soon. So those are the other strategies we're working on.

A.Y. Strauss: Very exciting. Diego, I always am inspired when I hang out with you. I think the people listening to this will have not only learned a lot but taken a lot of inspiration from you and your story. It's going to be a lot of fun to continue to watch your evolution. You're always thinking two, three steps ahead. So it's exciting. It's exciting to watch you take bets and guesses on where things are going to lie.

But you're always thinking, you're always moving, you're always analyzing—and very strategically, I might add. So I want to thank you for your friendship. Thank you for the time being on with us today. You're definitely one to watch, my friend. I think people are going to clue into this and follow your story at a significant level going forward. I really want to thank you again for the time today, Diego.

Diego Hodara: No, thank you. Just one thing, based on your saying—one of the things I always think is that, and I question myself, my own thesis, right? You have to actually undermine your own ideas until you are really sure that's the path to take. So I don't know whatever I think is right until I am actually convinced and then take action about it. But at the same time, or parallel to that, sometimes you need to jump to the unknown and solve the problem.

Because if you're thinking too much, you get stuck, you get frozen, and you don't act. Sometimes jump. You jump and explore and, okay, this didn't work that well. But you have to be very cautious when you are doing so with other people's money. So if it's your own money, yes, like I did. I bought my first two-family house with my own money. I jumped into it. Okay, but actually it worked very well because I learned a lot about it. But when you're dealing with other people's money, you have to be very careful [inaudible].

A.Y. Strauss: Well said, Diego. Well, keep up the great work. Hope you get to relax a little bit in the middle of all this chaos of development and whatnot. I know you've got an active personal life as well, but thanks for being on with us today. Thanks for making the time and just continue to inspire people through your success. So to be continued from here.

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