Like many entrepreneurs, Sam Eshaghoff got his start in business early. Instead of hawking candy on the playground, he sold good SAT scores to striving high school students on Long Island. That didn’t go well.
At 19, his test-taking business unraveled in a high-profile scandal during which his arrest made national headlines and Eshaghoff was forced to withdraw from Emory University.
“It really affected me for a long time,” Eshaghoff, now 33 and a New York City real estate developer, said. “It’s like trying to get dog poop out of your shoe. You’ve just got to keep on walking and scraping and it takes a while, but eventually it all goes away.”
Today, Eshaghoff, who grew up in Great Neck and now lives in the city, gets his grades (and paycheck) from square footage, lease deals and bank loans instead of multiple-choice questions. But his ambition still evokes the teenage test-taker’s. His development firm, West Egg Development, is completing its largest project, a 38-unit apartment building with 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space in Queens. The sleek grey, five-story building has floor-to-ceiling windows and occupies a corner lot in Bayside.
“This is the culmination of everything that’s led up to it,” Eshaghoff said as he toured the property on a recent Friday. “Hopefully, the next one’s even bigger.”
Not every New York City developer is a big-name, deep-pocketed and well-connected builder. Most are smaller upstarts who risk their own money and dream of making it big. For every 60-story tower in Midtown, there are dozens of outer-borough storage facilities and multifamily developments with a smaller name behind them.
Many of them are like Eshaghoff, who’d like to be connected with building, rather than his SAT gig.
The road to this point wasn’t easy. After graduating from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in 2014, Eshaghoff couldn’t land his dream job as an investment banker.
“I had a lot of trouble getting my first job because of the SAT situation,” he said. “Nobody wants to hire somebody who’s been in the news for that sort of stuff.”
His first break came from a Manhattan private equity firm that was starting a real estate division.
“I thought the whole scandal had a “two-edge sword” to it,” Arthur Bocchi, who hired Eshaghoff to help him launch the firm’s real estate arm, said. “He was obviously very intelligent to be able to take those tests and score so high. He also had some ingenuity and creativity, but it was being applied in the wrong way.”
The pair worked side by side to build a 400,000-square-foot cold storage facility near New Jersey’s Port Newark and a 75,000-square-foot condo project in Downtown Brooklyn.
“It was a lot of work for Sam and me to undertake together without much of a staff,” Bocchi said. “The more work I gave him, the more he was able to step up and do.”
They left the firm and started to flip one-, two- and three-family residential properties across the tristate area. A family office from Great Neck later hired Eshaghoff to handle acquisitions.
But Eshaghoff’s grandfather – a longtime homebuilder who emigrated from Iran in 1960 – encouraged him to go out on his own. With $125,000 of his savings and $480,000 from friends and family, he built his first solo project – two, two-family ground-up homes in East New York, Brooklyn. The project nearly collapsed when he ran out of money mid-construction, forcing him to personally guarantee a $500,000 bridge loan.
“It was well beyond my net worth at the time,” he said. “It was a very scary experience and I had to make the bank payment every month.”
He eventually sold the homes at a profit, giving him the confidence and capital to launch West Egg. He has since weathered the inevitable headaches of New York City real estate development, like neighbor disputes that shut down construction, permitting delays and other red tape.
But West Egg has grown steadily from small flips to multi-million-dollar projects and Eshaghoff rebuilt his reputation along the way. More than a decade and a dozen real estate projects after his arrest, he is putting the final touches on 215-20 Northern Boulevard, the Bayside development. It’s a 421a project and a joint venture with the longtime owners of the property, built with a $16 million construction loan from Ponce Bank.
Eshaghoff runs his business lean, hiring teams on a project-by-project basis and keeping overhead low. He is backed by friends and family investors, he said.
And the cheating scandal almost never comes up these days.
“I had to reinvent who I was and my skills,” he said. “I’m very happy with the way things have turned out. It’s a serendipitous, happy accident.”
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