“I spent a lot of weekends and nights with my dad, checking on potholes, making sure tenants’ lights didn’t have any bulbs out,” Kaplan recalled. “I saw from a very early stage when I was 8 or 9 years old the attention to detail my father had when it came to operating shopping centers. It was pretty much a given [that] I would end up in real estate. In what capacity, it was not that clear, but I knew I loved the business.”

Yet Kaplan did not follow a direct path into the industry. After graduating from Tulane University with a finance degree, he took a job in the CMBS large-loan origination group at Credit Suisse. “As you can imagine, working at an investment bank when you are 21 years old is like drinking from a fire hydrant,” Kaplan said. “You have to learn very quickly on the job.” 

Kaplan left Credit Suisse in 2007, after just two years — and seemingly in the nick of time. As the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008 and 2009, taking with it the market for large loans, his former office evaporated. “By 2009 and 2010 there was virtually nobody in those CMBS groups anymore,” Kaplan said. This would prove to be a blessing in disguise, though. “[For] a young guy recently out of college, my network was tremendous,” Kaplan said. “All of the folks I had worked with went to other firms. My Rolodex was as if I had been in the business for 20 years, when I had only been there for two.”

In the meantime, Kaplan had joined his father in the family business. But as Kabro opted to sit out the investment market during the throes of the recession and tend to its existing portfolio, Kaplan got the itch to enroll in law school. He attended Columbia Law School, where he was named a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar. By graduation time, however, he had decided that his entrepreneurial spirit would never be fulfilled through
a career as an attorney, and he turned down his first job offer. Instead, he joined his father to form a spinoff vehicle called Kaplan Equities. He bought, and subsequently flipped,
his first property investment: an industrial building in Philadelphia being converted into condos. 

The firm also began offering third-party property-management and leasing services from its base on Long Island. These were the activities that brought Kaplan into frequent talks with Ripco, one of the larger retail brokerages in that market. “It was a company I really admired,” Kaplan said. “They were always the most professional and sophisticated in the market.” After he pitched Ripco founder-principals Peter Ripka and Todd Cooper on a partnership, the two offered him the job of principal and COO. 

But Kaplan is not leaving the family business behind entirely: He has brought the Kaplan Equities property management team over to Ripco, and he will continue to have a stake in the company. His main focus now, however, will be on creating and developing new revenue streams for Ripco, which also has offices in New York City and in Lyndhurst, N.J. In particular, Kaplan sees an opportunity for the brokerage to build its investment sales business. 

“We have been sitting on the sidelines when it comes to investment sales, and that is an area for us to grow in,” Kaplan said. “Our access to information is probably second to none on the retail side [in the New York tristate area]. When a buyer is conducting due diligence on a shopping center in the markets we are in, they are calling one of our brokers, to get smart on the market.”

Kaplan is eager to strengthen and streamline the firm’s technological capabilities as well. “We have a database that would probably rival any of our competitors in its breadth,” he said. “For the past 25 years, we have been feeding it information on properties, on tenants. We are [going] to revamp the database and make it more accessible to our brokers. It could be even more seamless, with apps on your phone and the ability to customize individual reports.” 

Even as real estate brokerage firms merge into larger and larger entities, Ripco remains an unaffiliated outlier while boosting its position in the cutthroat New York market. Kaplan sees this independence as a critical advantage. “When you are a private company, you are able to maintain fundamental things, like a culture,” he said. “It allows you to make decisions you think are right. If we have a relationship or situation which causes us not to hit certain numbers but benefits our clients by doing so, that
is a decision we can make.”