Long before Tony Soares became a local businessperson, his father gave him sound advice.
“He looked around Hoboken and saw large areas of vacant lots and told me: ‘Nobody leaves this much empty space this close to New York,’” Soares recalled, one of several significant memories of his father, who was a role model for him.
Soares is one of those rare people who manages, after graduating from college, to gain wide experience in the business world. Even rarer, he learned a lot about the relationship between small business and government, while serving both as a city councilman—he was elected in 1999—and chair of the Hoboken Zoning Board of Adjustment. It was this last gig, he said, that gave him insight into the concerns of local businesspeople, who struggle to make a living in the local economy.
This eye-opening experience made him realize that small business is the lifeblood of a community, and the more help government can give these people, the more likely a community will thrive.
“I saw what businesses have to go through while I was on the board,” he said. This realization made him much more sympathetic to the needs of the business community at a time when government seemed for the most part to turn a deaf ear.
Soares moved to Hoboken in 1991. He was working in the advertising business at the time. A coworker found an apartment at 1000 Hudson St. for $500 a month. The condo association was willing to rent the place to them, provided they fixed it up.
Soares liked the look of Hoboken, decided to settle here, and started looking for a place to buy.
“I looked around town, uptown and even in the historic district,” he said. He eventually found a place, and the rest is history.
In Business
These days, Soares, 53, is a sales partner with the Hoboken-based Prime Real Estate Group. He owned his own real estate firm from late 2012 until early 2015, learning a lot about the industry and the area.
He and his colleagues see a huge new potential for the west side of Hoboken and the east side of the Heights, partly due to the construction of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, which was extended to Hoboken between 2002 and 2004. Changing demographics also played a role. People aren’t looking for temporary housing the way they once did in Hoboken. Many are settling down to raise families or build careers in a long-term relationship with this area.
After a two-decade career on Madison Avenue, Soares is sharp enough to appreciate subtle changes. For more than 20 years, he worked in advertising helping to—as he put it—bring famous products together with consumers.
His quick wit and cutting-edge ideas made him stand out as a politician more than a decade ago. But he has since become more attuned to the needs of neighborhoods. For example, his new office in the Heights embraces the emerging art scene, as artists flock to the west side of Hoboken and the Heights, often taking up residence in local factories that serve as galleries and work spaces. The office triples as a meeting place, art gallery, and real estate office.
Often, Soares said, a business has to take a chance, gamble on a trend, and have faith that the vision will pan out.
Among Soares’s goals? To make it easier for residents and local businesses to thrive. “Sometimes it’s not easy to get through government regulations,” he said.
Early Years
Soares was raised just on the other side of Hudson County in Kearny.
His father, who had attended vocational school, worked for a time for a small company helping to design and make prosthetics. His father got into a newly developing Kessler Associates, which became part of Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, designing prosthetics.
“This kept him from having to go to Korea during the war,” Soares said.
But his father did work with returning veterans at Walter Reed National Military Hospital in Maryland.
His father’s work may have given him insight into the raising of his son, who has a condition called Dwarfism, and has struggled with many of the issues associated with it, such as spinal problems. He was recently struck by a vehicle which, he said, created further complications.
His father, a Newark resident, met Soares’s mother on a blind date arranged by a coworker.
“My mother was Italian-American and lived in Kearny,” Soares said.
“I always wanted to be an architect,” Soares said. “But I was lousy in math.”
But he loved design. “I used to do floor plans as a kid,” he said, a harbinger, perhaps, of things to come.
His parents, whom he admired and viewed as role models, saw that he had talent for design and channeled his education in that direction.
A graduate of Kearny High in a college prep track, Soares went on to study design and communications at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, focusing on advertising design, and soon found himself on Madison Avenue.
Determined to be taken seriously, he said, “I had to prove myself.” Soares had a knack for clever ideas that allowed him to thrive in a very competitive industry.
Real Estate in his Blood?
A number of things made Soares hunger for a profession other than advertising. He discovered that a lot of the talents he’d honed in advertising worked well in real estate.
Soares went back to school, attending New York University to study commercial interior design, gradually fading out of the New York advertising scene to freelance.
“I left Manhattan,” he said. “I had a few freelancing jobs. But I was looking for something else.”
The next step was to get his real estate license.
“I had many of the skills needed for real estate,” he said. “I’m organized and learned how to follow up.
“I’m right where I want to be,” Soares said. “I like doing what I’m doing.”—07030
