Tony Telesco got into police work because he was “always a purpose-driven person” and wanted a career where he could help people. 

Prior to joining the force, the native of Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, a son of a bus driver, worked for a couple years as a social worker after graduating from St. Francis College (in Brooklyn of course) in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. 

But his foray into real estate “was engineered by my wife,” Telesco said, whom he met in 2009. Her father bought a house in North Bergen, N.J. back in the late 1970s, moved his family into the basement, and rented two apartments upstairs. Then he bought the house across the street and subdivided the lot and added another house to it to rent out.

Telesco retired from the NYPD in February of 2024, just shy of 27 years on the force. These days, he is working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority police as a civilian manager.

He started out as a beat cop, working for four years in the 9th Precinct, which covers Manhattan’s East Village. Then he moved to the police academy, where he taught law from 2001-2007. He was promoted to sergeant and spent 13 years in the Bronx in central booking, then moved over to a job working in the police commissioner’s budget office for his last four years. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in public administration from John Jay College in New York in 2017.

“I took the exam and joined in 1996, but I originally wanted to be a firefighter,” Telesco said. During his time in the force, he added, he “rescued two families from a burning building.”

His wife Crystal, who is of Brazilian and Guyanese descent, owned an apartment in Midtown east that they lived in after they married, then rented for several years after they moved to a different building nearby. In 2022, they sold his wife’s apartment and used the proceeds to put 50 percent down and buy a house in Hampton Bays, on Long Island, for $1.6 million. (They executed a 1031 exchange to avoid capital gains taxes.)

The family portfolio has grown to three coops they rent out in the building where they live on Manhattan’s east side, the house in the Hamptons and the two North Bergen properties his wife inherited.

“My house is big for bachelorette parties because it’s a five bedroom,” Telesco said. “I use VRBO and Airbnb to get the exposure, but I’m effectively the manager of everything, even down to hiring the cleaning lady.”

He has some repeat clients for the Hampton Bays house, including a regular renter for the Thanksgiving weekend. He and his family enjoy spending time out East during shoulder season, and it’s located so they can visit both the vineyards on the North Fork of Long Island, and the beaches on the South Fork. 

These days, he feels a bit overwhelmed with managing the properties and thinks about selling them and getting out. But his wife is a strong believer in a buy and hold strategy.

“I talk about it with my wife, but my wife is like her dad, she never wants to let anything go,” Telesco said. She works as a commercial real estate attorney, and he said plans to keep working his civil service job well into his late 60s. (He’s about to turn 55.)

“I like having a steady salary that’s reliable — I have anxiety about not having that,” he said. “There are periods of a few months where you have an empty apartment and that’s stressful. Right now, I have two weeks that are empty this summer (at the Hamptons house) and I need that money to keep it going.”

Still, he’s happy that his wife got him into it.

“I have a dream where I have enough real estate to not work,” but he doesn’t see that happening any time soon. 

“Real estate seems to be the best investment you can make since it goes up in value,” he said. “Your money gets tied up but if you need to you can borrow against it.”

He did say he might have looked outside New York, where there are more regulations and tenant protections than other places.

“Several of my friends in the department who are real estate investors tell me to invest in red states,” he said.

What is your special real estate superpower?

I’m good at connecting with people, whether it be clients, staff, or maintenance people. Anyone who does any work for me, I’m so good with them, they give me the 5-star treatment. I’m the kind of guy who lets the cleaning lady’s kids swim in the pool while she is cleaning the house. Those connections help so much when you are managing properties.

What was the hardest lesson you learned early on in your real estate journey, and how did you overcome that?

Not wanting to spend money on certain things and buying cheap and then finding out the hard way that was not the way to go. My wife has always insisted on that. Don’t half ass it, spend the money and do it the right way the first time.

What advice would you offer to somebody looking to get into real estate or grow a portfolio?

I think a lot of it is about willing to take the leap, take some chances. You need to see things on a small scale and then see things on a bigger scale. It’s like making a pot of stew. Prepare everything in advance and add a little at a time. Treat the house like it doesn’t belong to you and stay on top of everything. Be responsible and if you ever have a problem fix it right away. 

Among the strategies a property owner could pursue — long-term rental, mid-term rental or short term, (Airbnb), co-living — what works best for you, and why?

Long-term rental works the best for me, but the caveat is that I’m living very close to that person and can deal with problems right away. That would change if I had a property in Ohio. I’m able to deal with a leak or get a new microwave right away. With the short-term rentals, they always seem to have a question or an issue. They worry about every little thing.

Atlanta, once one of the darlings of SFR investors, is on a downward trend. Home prices are down over 10% in the past 6 months, from a high of about $441,000 at the end of June 2025 to just under $400,000 at the end of January, according to data from Realtor.com. The institutional investors that crowded into the Atlanta market are now bailing out. In 4 Atlanta zip codes, investors owning 350+ homes account for 25% or more of the homes for sale, Parcl Labs reported, which predicted further downward pressure on prices. Of the 64,597 investor-owned SFRs in Atlanta 574 are on the market and Parcl believes more homes will soon be in that pipeline.

America’s housing shortage is being exacerbated by the large data centers needed to fuel the artificial intelligence boom. Selling land to data-center developers can be far more profitable than developing homes, and local zoning can make it easier and faster to build data centers than housing, the Wall Street Journal reported. Northern Virginia, with its open land, network of fiber-optic cable and power infrastructure, has become the world’s data-center capital. The region also is more than 75,000 homes short of demand, according to the Virginia Association of Realtors, but developers are finding deals to sell land too good to pass up. Stanley Martin, a builder that planned a 516-home development on land in Bristow, Va., noticed the property nearby being bought up by tech giants over the last few years. In November, it cashed in and sold a portion of land it had paid $50 million a few years ago million $700 million to Amazon so it could build data centers. It was one of the biggest deals for vacant land ever.

JUST BECAUSE

A treasured waterfall in Oregon is set to be purchased by the state, thanks to a bipartisan group of lawmakers who came up with $2.1 million to buy it after it was put on the market in February by the Mount Angel Abbey, a local Benedictine order that has owned it for more than a century. But according to a report in the Oregonian, the state will be spending as much as $4 million and possibly up to $8.2 million to make the area around the 92-foot Abiqua Falls into a proper recreation area, state park documents show. While the abbey has allowed public access for hikers to the waterfall, which is just outside Silverton, about 14 miles northeast of the capital of Salem, both the road and the trail to the waterfall are treacherous. Drivers regularly get stuck on the rutted road to the trailhead, while the trail itself can be dangerous, even for experienced hikers. Serious injuries have happened, including a high-profile cliff diving incident in 2025, and incidents in 2017 and 2015 where hikers fell from the trail and rescuers had to be called in.

Most people saving for retirement have a number in mind. Fewer have a plan for turning that number into actual income.

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