197: The Judgment Behind Great Real Estate Deals with Patrick Carino, VP Development @ NRP Group, Founder @ DealNav

Early in his career, Patrick Carino tracked real estate opportunities with aerial maps pinned to the wall and a binder full of spreadsheets. It worked, but it exposed a bigger problem: real estate is inherently visual, yet much of the information developers use to make multimillion-dollar decisions is fragmented across spreadsheets, maps, inboxes, and relationships. That frustration eventually became DealNav. But it also opened up a much bigger conversation about how great developers actually make decisions.

Patrick Carino is Vice President of Development at The NRP Group, where he sources and executes market-rate multifamily developments across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. He’s also the founder of DealNav, a map-based deal-tracking tool he built after years of managing his own pipeline in Excel and Google My Maps — now used by real estate professionals across the globe who want a simpler map-based alternative to bloated CRMs.

Pat also brings a broad perspective across brokerage, entrepreneurial development, and institutional real estate. Before NRP, he worked at RMS and began his career at CBRE, where he was involved in more than $1 billion of investment sales transactions.

In this episode, we get into:

• Why capitalizing good deals may be harder than finding them right now.
• How decision-making changes when you move from one owner deploying his own capital to an institutional investment committee managing other people’s money.
• Why some of the best development opportunities still come through relationships, not simply better data.
• What working on $1B+ of transactions at CBRE taught Pat about validating every assumption.
• Why NRP built a highly specialized organization and how that structure supports scale.
• The Westchester deal Pat walked away from after investing meaningful time and money, and the lesson he refuses to learn twice.
• How NRP is growing its Northeast market-rate pipeline across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
• Why Pat built DealNav and what he learned turning an internal tool into a software business.

The through line is bigger than real estate software.

Information helps you find the opportunity. Relationships get you access. But judgment determines what you pursue, what you pass on, and whether you can ultimately get the deal built.

Resources:

• NRP Group: NRP Group Website
• CBRE: CBRE Website
• Deal Nav: Deal Nav Website
• Book/Resource Mentioned: $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi’s work for growth strategies, particularly in sales and business development.

Thank you for joining the Design Development community. Subscribe to capture insight from the latest episodes dropping every Wednesday.

Our goal is to help people like you identify opportunities for growth by sharing the journey of industry leaders. There is no one path. Success isn’t a straight line. There is something to learn from everyone’s story.  Let’s go!

Leave your thoughts in the comments and reach out if you want to be a valuable guest on the show!

NEW: More from me on Substack

It’s Structural: Get my take on the latest news, trends, and policies shaping commercial real estate. 

Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram & YouTube

Find out more at https://h-o.engineering/podcasts/