RICHARD PAKONEN
Real Estate Investment and Development
Rich Pakonen is the founder of PAK Properties, a Saint Paul, MN-based entrepreneurial real estate investment and development company primarily focused on urban and in-fill residential and commercial properties.
Pakonen earned his BA from St. Olaf College in 1990 and his MBA from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management in 1993. He started his career in the long-term care industry as the Administrator of a 110 bed skilled nursing facility. In 1996, he left the long-term care industry to focus exclusively on his growing real estate business.
Since then, PAK Properties has successfully developed and rehabilitated many properties. These projects have ranged from the renovation of existing apartment buildings to the conversion of vacant historic office and industrial buildings. The primary focus of most of these investments was housing—including for-sale condominiums, market-rate and low-income apartments, and assisted living facilities.
Alissa Gray
Alissa Gray is the Chief Operations Officer for PAK Properties. She is responsible for helping the company coordinate construction logistics, leasing activity, purchasing, legal and other real estate evaluation work on a variety of different properties and projects. She has helped Rich Pakonen expand PAK Properties from a company initially focused on owning and managing rental housing to a full-service real estate development and management firm.
Alissa has more than twenty years of commercial real estate experience in the Saint Paul marketplace. She joined PAK Properties in 2003 after working with the Welsh Companies on a number of different projects that also included working with the Saint Paul Port Authority. She began her real estate career when she started a cleaning company when she was 19. She has been a licensed real estate professional since 1998
Key project experience
Alissa has helped lead the PAK Properties team on three major downtown Saint Paul project that have created hundreds of new housing units and significant new commercial development.
The Rossmor Building
The Lowry Building
The Pioneer Endicott Buildings
She has two teenage daughters and loves spending time with her family.