In 2016 I interviewed two of Moscow real estate’s founding fathers who have been inspirational to many: Parker Hudson and Gere Gaige. Here is Parker’s story.
With the move away from state ownership of all property in 1991, Russia suddenly needed concepts and systems for valuing, developing, marketing, buying, selling and renting all forms of real estate, including residential and commercial buildings and land.
At almost the same time, The CCIM Institute, the U.S. organization dedicated to education and best practice in real estate investment, wanted to go international - to create a common language for investing in real estate. Parker Hudson was a long time CCIM instructor who had studied Russian in St. Petersburg while a graduate student in the summer of 1969. CCIM asked him to try to figure out a way to introduce CCIM to the Soviet Union.
Coincidentally, down the hall from Parker's real estate brokerage office in Atlanta was the office of a man named Earl Worsham. By 1991 Mr. Worsham had already been partners for three years with Andrei Stroyev in a company called Perestroika Joint Venture, which had redeveloped the first commercial office building for rent in Moscow: Bolshoi Gnezhnekovski 26. In a classic frontier market deal, they had invested about $1,000 per square meter in renovating the building, using part of the tenant's multi-year up front lease payment, with the rental rate also being about $1,000 per square meter per year.
Parker asked Earl if he had any ideas on who would be interested in a CCIM course in Moscow. Andrei Stroyev happened to be there, so they went to lunch. Stroyev used Moscapstroi to do the construction on his projects and wanted them to understand the investment principles behind his business, so he introduced Parker to Boris Selivanov, who was Chairman of Moscapstroi. In May 1991 Parker met Mr. Selivanov and Andrei Belaborodov of Moscapstroi on a one day stopover in Moscow en route home from a week of Christian outreach work in Kiev.
Boris and Moscapstroi were serious about learning about U.S. real estate - while they wanted to have the course taught in Moscow, they were even more interested in having the 50 people on their management team see how real estate worked in U.S. cities. They paid CCIM to develop and conduct a full program that included the two-week course in Moscow followed by ten day tours of five U.S. cities for five groups of ten Moscapstroi managers.
Parker started writing the course, combining the relevant parts of CI 101 & 102 and renewed his study of Russian. He stumbled upon a Russian course for adults by chance. One day among the mass mailings that came to his office was a flyer on classes at Emory University. Parker paid no attention to it and tossed it in the waste basket. But the flyer caught on the rim and when he reached down to push it in he saw the advertisement for Russian lessons.
He signed up for the tutoring course. when it was time to have the new CCIM course translated, Parker naturally asked his Russian teacher. She couldn't do it, but her husband offered to. His name was Oleg Myshkin.

Finally, in September 1991, a few weeks after the unsuccessful coup against President Gorbachev, Parker was joined in Moscow by Allen Decker and Sandy Shindleman to teach the first CCIM course in Russia. He also brought over 50 Delta Airlines tickets for the Russians’ U.S. tours that followed a month later.
Parker's interest in Russian real estate was sparked. Andrei Belaborodov identified a good empty site in the center that Moscapstroi controlled: Bolshoi Gnezhnekovskii Pereulok 1. A few years later Samsung would eventually build a new Class A office building on the site, but in 1992 Parker and Andrei set out to attempt a first ground-up office development in Moscow. Parker and a colleague named Bradley Fulkerson offered the project to the company where they worked - Carter & Associates, who turned it down. Then they talked with a young Carter real estate broker named Preston Haskell, who thought his father's development company in Jacksonville might be interested. Together as partners, Parker, Preston, Oleg and Bradley made trips to Moscow in 1992 and early 1993 to investigate the possibility, but in the new market there was no way to finance the project.
By the spring of 1993 Oleg and Preston were also convinced that Moscow had potential, but decided it would be better to start in brokerage. Together they founded Haskell International Brokerage, or HIB, which would eventually become Colliers.
Later in 1993 Parker met Page Aiken and convinced him to join him in opening their own brokerage company in Moscow, which they did in November 1993. Maria Troitskaya became the first Russian employee of The Western Group, while Oksana Tikhonovsky administered the office from Atlanta. Soon Parker and Page would be joined at The Western Group by Mark Stiles and Sergei Ryabokobylko. And then in 1996 he hired me. But those are stories for another time...