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Owner’s
Corner
Family and Fleet by Grant Boyd Edward Rose & Sons, a family-owned real estate development
and management business, celebrates its 100th anniversary.
Ted Jacobson, Warren Rose, Chris Lentini, 1997.
Warren Rose and Chris Lentini, 2007.
Since its founding, real-estate company Edward Rose he later said, would be selling a home in the early 1930s.
& Sons has completed more than 80,000 housing units
across 15 states. General aviation has been an integral part and key competitive advantage of the Rose family and their namesake business most of its 100 years.
The family’s flying lineage first began with Edward Rose. His beginnings were not in the sky, the construction industry, or even in the United States. Born in Czarist Russia in the late 1800s, Edward immigrated to America as a teenager searching for a new life. With sights originally set on working for the high-paying Ford Motor Company ($5 per day for assembly line workers), fortune would find that he did not find work at the automobile manufacturer and instead became a carpenter. He then quickly moved into building and selling new homes, which ultimately was the foundation of the company that now bears his name a century later.
Business at the time was hard, especially after the stock market crashed and the Great Depression loomed. Even so, Edward persevered. One of his greatest achievements,
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Other achievements of his life were his marriage to his wife Lillian and raising their four sons, all of whom would work in the building business. Catching favorable winds from soldier homecomings after World War II, the company built an increasing number of quality homes for working- class families.
In the subsequent decade or so following this economic boom, Edward’s son Sheldon transitioned from single- family domicile construction to what would be one of the next real estate booms – multi-family, garden-style apartment communities.
Using his own plane, Sheldon would scout out potential land acquisitions and check in on projects under construction. Flying was a natural decision for Sheldon as he had his pilot’s license since the late 1940s when he was serving in the Coast Guard. At the outset, he trained in a Piper Cub but later transitioned to a Cessna 190 and then a Cessna 421 Golden Eagle for business purposes. His appreciation and love for aviation extended past its