Advisory Board
Chuck Schilke, Chairman
Prior to joining Hopkins in December 2012, he created and led the Georgetown University Master of Professional Studies in Real Estate program, which in 4 ½ years grew to 50 real estate courses, 50 practitioner faculty, and 300 students. Chuck has worked for law firms (Cadwalader and McKenna Long & Aldridge), for corporations (Exxon Mobil and Marriott), and for nonprofits (The American National Red Cross). He has built, bought, sold, and financed all major building types—office, retail, industrial, hotel, and residential—and ventured into exotic areas like biomedical and telecommunications real estate. In addition to serving on the REAI Alumni Board, Chuck has served on the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Council, and was recently elected to the Harvard Student Agencies Graduate Board, where he serves as Secretary. He was educated at The University of Chicago, Harvard, and Cornell Law School.
David Borchardt
David Borchardt is an independent consultant with nearly 30 years of building design, construction, and operations experience. He has gained recognition as a sustainability expert who oversaw the transformation of a corporate sustainability program from initial concept to reality while ensuring that these initiatives increased profitability. He was the Chief Sustainability Officer for The Tower Companies’ and was responsible for ensuring that the corporate goals for environmentally conscious & sustainable development were incorporated in new and existing developments. He oversaw a portfolio which included of office buildings, malls, residential communities, and hotels in the Washington DC metro area. He is a mechanical engineer by training and has been an invited speaker and author at Harvard Business School, Georgetown University, BOMA, NRDC, AIA, and Net Impact. He also teaches a one semester course at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies.
Dr. Mina Marefat, AIA
Mina Marefat, an architectural historian, urban designer, and registered architect, holds a PhD from MIT, a Masters in Architecture and Urban design from Harvard University and an Urban Planning degree from Tehran University. She has been a Fulbright fellow in Paris, an NEH fellow and a Rockefeller Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center for Scholarly Studies at the Library of Congress where she initiated the Cities Project to address new research and conferences on lesser known but important cities around the world. Dr. Marefat currently teaches at Georgetown and has taught at Johns Hopkins University and Catholic University of America's School of Architecture, where she initiated a collaborative studio project on the reconstruction of Bam after its devastating earthquake. She has taught art, architecture, and urbanism at MIT, Wesleyan University, and Technical University in Vienna, Austria. She has lectured internationally and published widely including groundbreaking research on the urban planning work of Frank Lloyd Wright and a 2014 book on Le Corbusier's Gymnasium published in French and English by Edition Patrimoine in Paris. Her practice at Design Research office has focused on the revitalization and rehabilitation of cities and streetscapes, including Washington, Newark, Tehran, and Isfahan, in each case integrating cultural heritage with redevelopment. Prior to establishing her firm she served as senior architectural historian at the Smithsonian Institution and research associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She later served as director of architectural education at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, Switzerland.
Tony Cord
Tony Cord is highly-visible in the greater Washington, DC region, having served in leadership, BD, advisory and operating roles in a wide spectrum of small, middle-market and Fortune 500 enterprises - including bootstrapped startups, PE-backed mid-market emerging growth and publicly-traded global companies,
At home in the boardroom as well as in collaborative co-working spaces, and everything in between, he has earned unique access to and credibility with the region’s vibrant entrepreneurial community, as well as its established business, public sector and academic executives. He offers company boards insights based on deep experience, strong strategic and analytic skills, and the ability to proactively connect dots, accessing his expert network, driving productive introductions to key accounts, investors, decision makers and policy-setters.
Cord began his corporate career in management with DC’s electric energy company, exiting after 7 years to try entrepreneurship as a founding principal of Capitol Financial Consultants where, from `87 through `91 he advised growth-minded companies and was featured in the SBA’s SUCCESS Symposium and Video Library Series as an expert on business and financial planning. He then assisted two family-owned businesses consolidating their operations, building powerful JVs and executing M&A strategy as the non-family president. In 1997, he joined American Express Corporation as part of a small M&A team making an historic public company entry into professional services, consolidating CPA and consulting practices, growing the business unit from $5M to over $400M in less than 5 years before being sold to H&R Block.
Once in the CPA/accounting/consulting space, Cord took BD leadership roles with several small, innovative firms introducing new service and product offerings, including asset management and online B2B and B2C accounting, tax and business services. After non-competition covenants expired, he returned to larger firms in the CPA/accounting/consulting space, in regional business development roles at BDO, Clifton Gunderson and Navigant Consulting – all during periods of rapid growth and change. Most recently he seeded the Mid-Atlantic expansion market for Texas-based and PE-backed M&A advisor Riveron, and since 2014 led a regional practice at Tatum, providing interim C-Suite executives to companies in transition. He is the co-founder of Washington Opportunity Institute, a DC-based workforce development company serving returning citizens, veterans and seniors in underrepresented communities.
Education and Certifications: M.B.A., Southern Illinois University; B.S., University of Maryland R.H. Smith School of Business; Davidson College (freshman scholarship student athlete); DeMatha Catholic High School; NASD Series 7 and 63 (1987-91); Oracle Small Business Certified (now NetSuite – 2001).
Board Affiliations: Fish & Richardson IP Review Board Member; Federal City Council of DC, Former Trustee; Leadership Greater Washington Class of 2007 Member; Washington SmartCEO/BDO Future 50 Awards, Former Co-Chairman; Metropolitan Police Department Foundation, Former Board Member; DC Innovates (Digital DC Tech Fund), Former Co-Chairman of the Board; Potomac Ridge Behavioral Health Foundation, Former Trustee; CommuniClique, LLC, Former Chairman of the Advisory Board; MD/BDO Tech Champions Awards, Creator; Various emerging private company Advisory Board memberships.
Tony Pillai
Brings more than 25 years of experience as a key innovator and implementer of high-technology solutions for federal, quasi-government, and Fortune 100 companies both in local and international market places. He thrives in today’s IT-driven world through his leadership and strategic approach in integrating technology and business. He has shared his visions with cabinet-level members from numerous countries on how to increase technology awareness, information sharing and access, and promoted e-Government while increasing IT operational inefficiencies and cost savings. He has earned awards for championing corporate process excellence, and improving operational effectiveness. Tony has held executive roles in business and global product development, investment & capital markets and served as Policy Board Member for the DC Health Information Exchange (DC-HIE).
Tony earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Central Florida. He holds a MBA degree from Nova Southeastern University and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Howard Ecker
Founded Howard Ecker + Company in 1975 as the first company in Chicago devoted exclusively to representing tenants. Howard works with business leaders to align office location thinking with the long term fiscal and cultural needs of their business, connecting the worth of the company to its brand, culture and environment. During his tenure, Howard has completed lease transactions in virtually every state in the country. Other achievements include successfully negotiating a built-to-suit space for the Shure Brothers corporate headquarters, securing 200,000 square feet in two leases for his client BDO in Midtown Manhattan.
Howard started his career at Cushman & Wakefield working as the original leasing agent for the John Hancock Center during its initial construction. He then joined Arthur Rubloff & Company where he became the head of the office leasing department and the youngest member of the Board of Directors. While there, Howard worked on large-scale projects including the development and leasing of the Time Life Building, Commerce Plaza in Oak Brook and First National Bank of Dayton.
Howard is a member of the Board of Directors for Chicago’s Adler Planetarium.
Howard graduated from Tulane University in 1966 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian History and attended DePaul Law School.
Howard lives in Lincoln Park with Janet Ecker. He has identical twin daughters who work with him at Howard Ecker + Company.
Joanie Millane
Joan Millane, Principal, Millane Partners, LLC, has a broad range of experience in the financing and delivery of real estate projects through Public-Private Partnerships. She was formerly responsible for the real estate asset management divisions for the Resolution Trust Corporation and The Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C. More recently, Joanie was the Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Real Estate and was the Assistant Vice President for Asset Management at the University of Maryland.
Since 2003, Joanie has co-owned a consulting firm which assists governments, colleges and universities, and other not-for-profit organizations to develop their real estate projects using P3 methodology, to draft RFP’s, select developers, negotiate the business terms in the legal documents on behalf of the institution, and to implement their transactions for the development of student housing, research parks, mixed-use projects and transit-oriented developments.
Joanie has served as faculty, teaching public-private real estate methodology and financing concepts for various national organizations such as the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, the Construction Owners Association of America, the Association of University Real Estate Parks , the Association of University Real Estate Officers, The Urban Land Institute (ULI), and The Lincoln Institute for Land Policy. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Neighborhood Design Center, a Committee Member for Boys Hope-Girls Hope, and is currently a Board Member for Lambda Alpha, a national land use and preservation honor society. Joanie received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Please learn more about Joanie Millane and Millane Partners at www.millanepartners.com.
John J. Hentschel
John J. Hentschel is founder and CEO of Hentschel Real Estate Services LLC, a real estate valuation, consulting and advisory firm that for 40 years has assisted leaders in business, government, law and finance in the US and abroad make difficult decisions, solve intractable problems, and seize strategic opportunities. Organizations such as the World Bank, US Agency for International Development, Eastern European Real Property Foundation, and the Urban Institute have relied on his advice. A trusted adviser to three Mayors of Baltimore and a former head of the City's Department of Real Estate, he supervised a portfolio of 6,000 properties; instituted the City's first comprehensive asset management plan; and made significant contributions for over a decade to Baltimore's redevelopment renaissance as a key figure in many of the City's most complex real estate, economic development and financing transactions including negotiation of the City's largest pubic-private joint venture, a $300 million waterfront mixed use redevelopment of a former rail yard at Port Covington.
Formerly a member of the University of Baltimore Real Estate faculty and a contributing author to Urban Institute’s seminal book, Managing Government Property Assets-International Experiences, he is an internationally recognized expert, speaker and author on real estate valuation and asset management practices who has provided guidance to Canada's National Executive Forum on Public Property; the International Valuation Standards Council on the development of Professional Standards for the valuation of government owned properties worldwide; and has been a long serving member of the Appraisal Foundation Advisory Council in the United States.
The author of numerous articles on real estate and valuation topics, he has been a member of the editorial boards of the professional journals Modus America and Real Estate Issues the latter of which he now serves as Editor in Chief. The 2011 recipient of the prestigious James Felt Creative Counseling Award for his work advising the Republic of Serbia on the valuation and reuse of surplus military properties to foster economic development, he also assisted Serbia’s Central Bank devise policies to facilitate the formulation of professional valuation standards, transparent valuation procedures, and accurate information systems to better serve the evolving Serbian real estate market.
An industry leader, he is currently a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Counselors of Real Estate of which he was 2015 Vice Chairman for External Affairs.
Teri M. Guarnaccia
Tina is known for her work on real estate finance transactions, including representation of large institutional lenders. She has a particular focus on the public finance area, where she has acted as underwriter's counsel, borrower's counsel, and bond counsel in numerous tax-exempt and taxable bond financing. Ms. Guarnaccia has experience with a wide range of financing structures, including traditional fixed-rate, variable-rate, and multimodal structures involving various forms of credit enhancement and liquidity support.
Prior to joining Hopkins in December 2012, he created and led the Georgetown University Master of Professional Studies in Real Estate program, which in 4 ½ years grew to 50 real estate courses, 50 practitioner faculty, and 300 students. Chuck has worked for law firms (Cadwalader and McKenna Long & Aldridge), for corporations (Exxon Mobil and Marriott), and for nonprofits (The American National Red Cross). He has built, bought, sold, and financed all major building types—office, retail, industrial, hotel, and residential—and ventured into exotic areas like biomedical and telecommunications real estate. In addition to serving on the REAI Alumni Board, Chuck has served on the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Council, and was recently elected to the Harvard Student Agencies Graduate Board, where he serves as Secretary. He was educated at The University of Chicago, Harvard, and Cornell Law School.
David Borchardt
David Borchardt is an independent consultant with nearly 30 years of building design, construction, and operations experience. He has gained recognition as a sustainability expert who oversaw the transformation of a corporate sustainability program from initial concept to reality while ensuring that these initiatives increased profitability. He was the Chief Sustainability Officer for The Tower Companies’ and was responsible for ensuring that the corporate goals for environmentally conscious & sustainable development were incorporated in new and existing developments. He oversaw a portfolio which included of office buildings, malls, residential communities, and hotels in the Washington DC metro area. He is a mechanical engineer by training and has been an invited speaker and author at Harvard Business School, Georgetown University, BOMA, NRDC, AIA, and Net Impact. He also teaches a one semester course at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies.
Dr. Mina Marefat, AIA
Mina Marefat, an architectural historian, urban designer, and registered architect, holds a PhD from MIT, a Masters in Architecture and Urban design from Harvard University and an Urban Planning degree from Tehran University. She has been a Fulbright fellow in Paris, an NEH fellow and a Rockefeller Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center for Scholarly Studies at the Library of Congress where she initiated the Cities Project to address new research and conferences on lesser known but important cities around the world. Dr. Marefat currently teaches at Georgetown and has taught at Johns Hopkins University and Catholic University of America's School of Architecture, where she initiated a collaborative studio project on the reconstruction of Bam after its devastating earthquake. She has taught art, architecture, and urbanism at MIT, Wesleyan University, and Technical University in Vienna, Austria. She has lectured internationally and published widely including groundbreaking research on the urban planning work of Frank Lloyd Wright and a 2014 book on Le Corbusier's Gymnasium published in French and English by Edition Patrimoine in Paris. Her practice at Design Research office has focused on the revitalization and rehabilitation of cities and streetscapes, including Washington, Newark, Tehran, and Isfahan, in each case integrating cultural heritage with redevelopment. Prior to establishing her firm she served as senior architectural historian at the Smithsonian Institution and research associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She later served as director of architectural education at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, Switzerland.
Tony Cord
Tony Cord is highly-visible in the greater Washington, DC region, having served in leadership, BD, advisory and operating roles in a wide spectrum of small, middle-market and Fortune 500 enterprises - including bootstrapped startups, PE-backed mid-market emerging growth and publicly-traded global companies,
At home in the boardroom as well as in collaborative co-working spaces, and everything in between, he has earned unique access to and credibility with the region’s vibrant entrepreneurial community, as well as its established business, public sector and academic executives. He offers company boards insights based on deep experience, strong strategic and analytic skills, and the ability to proactively connect dots, accessing his expert network, driving productive introductions to key accounts, investors, decision makers and policy-setters.
Cord began his corporate career in management with DC’s electric energy company, exiting after 7 years to try entrepreneurship as a founding principal of Capitol Financial Consultants where, from `87 through `91 he advised growth-minded companies and was featured in the SBA’s SUCCESS Symposium and Video Library Series as an expert on business and financial planning. He then assisted two family-owned businesses consolidating their operations, building powerful JVs and executing M&A strategy as the non-family president. In 1997, he joined American Express Corporation as part of a small M&A team making an historic public company entry into professional services, consolidating CPA and consulting practices, growing the business unit from $5M to over $400M in less than 5 years before being sold to H&R Block.
Once in the CPA/accounting/consulting space, Cord took BD leadership roles with several small, innovative firms introducing new service and product offerings, including asset management and online B2B and B2C accounting, tax and business services. After non-competition covenants expired, he returned to larger firms in the CPA/accounting/consulting space, in regional business development roles at BDO, Clifton Gunderson and Navigant Consulting – all during periods of rapid growth and change. Most recently he seeded the Mid-Atlantic expansion market for Texas-based and PE-backed M&A advisor Riveron, and since 2014 led a regional practice at Tatum, providing interim C-Suite executives to companies in transition. He is the co-founder of Washington Opportunity Institute, a DC-based workforce development company serving returning citizens, veterans and seniors in underrepresented communities.
Education and Certifications: M.B.A., Southern Illinois University; B.S., University of Maryland R.H. Smith School of Business; Davidson College (freshman scholarship student athlete); DeMatha Catholic High School; NASD Series 7 and 63 (1987-91); Oracle Small Business Certified (now NetSuite – 2001).
Board Affiliations: Fish & Richardson IP Review Board Member; Federal City Council of DC, Former Trustee; Leadership Greater Washington Class of 2007 Member; Washington SmartCEO/BDO Future 50 Awards, Former Co-Chairman; Metropolitan Police Department Foundation, Former Board Member; DC Innovates (Digital DC Tech Fund), Former Co-Chairman of the Board; Potomac Ridge Behavioral Health Foundation, Former Trustee; CommuniClique, LLC, Former Chairman of the Advisory Board; MD/BDO Tech Champions Awards, Creator; Various emerging private company Advisory Board memberships.
Tony Pillai
Brings more than 25 years of experience as a key innovator and implementer of high-technology solutions for federal, quasi-government, and Fortune 100 companies both in local and international market places. He thrives in today’s IT-driven world through his leadership and strategic approach in integrating technology and business. He has shared his visions with cabinet-level members from numerous countries on how to increase technology awareness, information sharing and access, and promoted e-Government while increasing IT operational inefficiencies and cost savings. He has earned awards for championing corporate process excellence, and improving operational effectiveness. Tony has held executive roles in business and global product development, investment & capital markets and served as Policy Board Member for the DC Health Information Exchange (DC-HIE).
Tony earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Central Florida. He holds a MBA degree from Nova Southeastern University and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Howard Ecker
Founded Howard Ecker + Company in 1975 as the first company in Chicago devoted exclusively to representing tenants. Howard works with business leaders to align office location thinking with the long term fiscal and cultural needs of their business, connecting the worth of the company to its brand, culture and environment. During his tenure, Howard has completed lease transactions in virtually every state in the country. Other achievements include successfully negotiating a built-to-suit space for the Shure Brothers corporate headquarters, securing 200,000 square feet in two leases for his client BDO in Midtown Manhattan.
Howard started his career at Cushman & Wakefield working as the original leasing agent for the John Hancock Center during its initial construction. He then joined Arthur Rubloff & Company where he became the head of the office leasing department and the youngest member of the Board of Directors. While there, Howard worked on large-scale projects including the development and leasing of the Time Life Building, Commerce Plaza in Oak Brook and First National Bank of Dayton.
Howard is a member of the Board of Directors for Chicago’s Adler Planetarium.
Howard graduated from Tulane University in 1966 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian History and attended DePaul Law School.
Howard lives in Lincoln Park with Janet Ecker. He has identical twin daughters who work with him at Howard Ecker + Company.
Joanie Millane
Joan Millane, Principal, Millane Partners, LLC, has a broad range of experience in the financing and delivery of real estate projects through Public-Private Partnerships. She was formerly responsible for the real estate asset management divisions for the Resolution Trust Corporation and The Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C. More recently, Joanie was the Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Real Estate and was the Assistant Vice President for Asset Management at the University of Maryland.
Since 2003, Joanie has co-owned a consulting firm which assists governments, colleges and universities, and other not-for-profit organizations to develop their real estate projects using P3 methodology, to draft RFP’s, select developers, negotiate the business terms in the legal documents on behalf of the institution, and to implement their transactions for the development of student housing, research parks, mixed-use projects and transit-oriented developments.
Joanie has served as faculty, teaching public-private real estate methodology and financing concepts for various national organizations such as the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, the Construction Owners Association of America, the Association of University Real Estate Parks , the Association of University Real Estate Officers, The Urban Land Institute (ULI), and The Lincoln Institute for Land Policy. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Neighborhood Design Center, a Committee Member for Boys Hope-Girls Hope, and is currently a Board Member for Lambda Alpha, a national land use and preservation honor society. Joanie received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Please learn more about Joanie Millane and Millane Partners at www.millanepartners.com.
John J. Hentschel
John J. Hentschel is founder and CEO of Hentschel Real Estate Services LLC, a real estate valuation, consulting and advisory firm that for 40 years has assisted leaders in business, government, law and finance in the US and abroad make difficult decisions, solve intractable problems, and seize strategic opportunities. Organizations such as the World Bank, US Agency for International Development, Eastern European Real Property Foundation, and the Urban Institute have relied on his advice. A trusted adviser to three Mayors of Baltimore and a former head of the City's Department of Real Estate, he supervised a portfolio of 6,000 properties; instituted the City's first comprehensive asset management plan; and made significant contributions for over a decade to Baltimore's redevelopment renaissance as a key figure in many of the City's most complex real estate, economic development and financing transactions including negotiation of the City's largest pubic-private joint venture, a $300 million waterfront mixed use redevelopment of a former rail yard at Port Covington.
Formerly a member of the University of Baltimore Real Estate faculty and a contributing author to Urban Institute’s seminal book, Managing Government Property Assets-International Experiences, he is an internationally recognized expert, speaker and author on real estate valuation and asset management practices who has provided guidance to Canada's National Executive Forum on Public Property; the International Valuation Standards Council on the development of Professional Standards for the valuation of government owned properties worldwide; and has been a long serving member of the Appraisal Foundation Advisory Council in the United States.
The author of numerous articles on real estate and valuation topics, he has been a member of the editorial boards of the professional journals Modus America and Real Estate Issues the latter of which he now serves as Editor in Chief. The 2011 recipient of the prestigious James Felt Creative Counseling Award for his work advising the Republic of Serbia on the valuation and reuse of surplus military properties to foster economic development, he also assisted Serbia’s Central Bank devise policies to facilitate the formulation of professional valuation standards, transparent valuation procedures, and accurate information systems to better serve the evolving Serbian real estate market.
An industry leader, he is currently a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Counselors of Real Estate of which he was 2015 Vice Chairman for External Affairs.
Teri M. Guarnaccia
Tina is known for her work on real estate finance transactions, including representation of large institutional lenders. She has a particular focus on the public finance area, where she has acted as underwriter's counsel, borrower's counsel, and bond counsel in numerous tax-exempt and taxable bond financing. Ms. Guarnaccia has experience with a wide range of financing structures, including traditional fixed-rate, variable-rate, and multimodal structures involving various forms of credit enhancement and liquidity support.