However, as is so often the case, at the same time that he was accepted to Hastings Law School in San Francisco, fate intervened, and he was also offered a job by a family acquaintance to help develop a commercial real estate project being planned in Ventura, California. After consulting with friends and family (and his then girlfriend who was to become his wife of over 30 years), David decided to defer law school and take the development job. David never did go to law school, having found that working with lawyers on entitlements, financing, construction, and leases while getting to develop interesting real estate projects was the best of both worlds. Six years later, he’d gone through the entire development cycle for a ground-up waterfront development called Ventura Harbor Village, with a diverse array of facilities including office, retail, restaurants, boat slips, boatyards, piers, fish receiving facilities, marine industrial, storage and even a carousel.

When that project was complete, David was offered the opportunity to remain with the company and manage the project, but by that time he’d caught the development bug and left to do main-stream commercial development - first with a West Coast developer of office and shopping center properties, English & Continental Property Group, and subsequently with The Shidler Group, a national firm based in Hawaii. In 1990, David started his present company, Wald Realty Advisors, when his boss at Shidler (who was then in the process of downsizing) introduced him to a construction lender who needed someone to complete a foreclosed REO office project for them. David soon became the outsourced REO manager for that bank, completing, leasing, operating, and selling most of that bank’s foreclosed commercial properties.

This work brought him into contact with receivers who were appointed by the bank prior to foreclosure, and soon thereafter lenders began asking him to act as receiver himself. Initially he worked on smaller existing apartment buildings and commercial properties, leading to increasingly more complex receivership assignments, the largest of which was a distressed apartment project with over 1,800 units in more than 100 buildings in East Palo Alto, California. Over the ensuing 24 years, WRA has gone onto work with over 200 clients, including more than 70 lenders such as Wells Fargo, Union Bank, Bank of America, Mitsui Real Estate, Prudential, GE Capital, among many others. David’s particular specialty has become the entitlement, completion, and sale of distressed development projects in receivership, having closed nearly 200 transactions in the past 5 years alone.

David Wald has now been an active state and federal court receiver for nearly 20 years, predominantly for real estate and related assets. He’ll tell you that, for him, one of best things about being a receiver – and a big source of satisfaction – is being able to get complex projects completed (and often sold) in the midst of highly adversarial litigation. Additionally, when the receivership has ended, he enjoys leaving the receivership assets in far better condition than when the receivership started.

David is a member of the Board of Directors of the California Receiver’s Forum (LA/OC Chapter); a licensed California real estate broker; a licensed California general contractor; a Certified Shopping Center Manager (CSM) as designated by the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC); a member of the Real Estate Investment Advisory Council (REIAC) Advisory Board; an Associate Member of the Urban Land Institute; and writes the commercial real estate blog, As We See It.

David now lives with his wife and two children, a dog and a cat in Los Angeles. When he’s not working, David enjoys traveling with a focus on visiting the world’s great art museums, having so far visited over 30 art museums in 11 cities in 6 countries. Spain is next on the list.

*Robert P. Mosier is a Southern California receiver and trustee and principal of Mosier & Company, Inc., a firm that has specialized in managing and turning around troubled companies for more than 25 years.