David Firestein ’75 MBA Creates Real Estate Scholarship

When David Firestein was a child, two of his favorite pastimes were the board game Monopoly and playing baseball. When he finished his undergraduate degree, it had become clear that becoming a professional baseball player wasn’t in the cards, so he turned his attention to his other passion and applied to business school. “It really made me think back to playing Monopoly,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Let's see if I can do this in real life.’”

Firestein is now a successful retail broker in New York with clients like Whole Foods and Starbucks, and he credits Isenberg with helping him to start on this path. When he enrolled at Isenberg for his MBA, he came in with a liberal arts undergraduate background and much less workforce experience than other students in the program. Despite this, he says that Isenberg opened him up to a whole new environment and empowered him to pursue his own path.

“For me personally, the thing that stood out to me most about Isenberg was honestly the flexibility of the program,” Firestein says. “I was interested in marketing and I was interested in real estate. There was no real estate program in those days, but the school was really good about letting me create a program that worked for me.”

This experience also made Firestein keen on paying it forward. “I didn’t have a good mentor in my earlier jobs, and I realized how important that is,” he says. “It’s so helpful having somebody who’s been there and has learned and been successful to kind of guide you and go, ‘You’re doing fine, this is how it works.’”

Supporting Isenberg Students

Firestein hopes that creating the David Firestein Real Estate Scholarship will empower UMass undergraduate and graduate students specializing in real estate and give them support and guidance so that they can succeed in the industry. The scholarship’s first recipient will be selected in the coming 2024-25 academic year, and more recipients will be selected in following years as the endowment grows.

He also provided some advice to students looking to build a career in real estate. He emphasizes the importance of playing the long game and remembering that as an early professional, not everything has to be perfect in the moment. There’s still a long career journey ahead, and the relationships you form early in your career can become very important later on. “The real estate business is a big business, but it’s a small business too,” he says. “I still run across people sometimes who I don’t see for long periods of time and then they show up again in my life five or ten years later. So yeah, long game.”

But the biggest lesson he’s learned throughout his career? That would be remembering the basics. “No matter what you learn in school, being successful comes down to a lot of the basics,” he says. “When you’re working with clients, it’s following up with them, doing what you’re saying you’re going to do. Being prepared sounds easy, but it’s amazing how often I see people going to meetings and they’re not prepared. Just a lot of the basics that maybe Mom or Dad told you still carry through.”