Nelson Del Rio

Nelson has been with Blokable from the beginning – as an advisor since the company’s founding and as co-CEO in 2017. Nelson graduated from Harvard Law School in 1987 and has been an active and continuous member of the California State Bar since 1987. Nelson began his career as a Merger and Acquisition Attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom then went on to become an active impact investor, developer, and philanthropist. In additional to his retail, land and other type of real estate acquisitions and development, Nelson is best known for his efforts in early single asset securitization, as well as the creation of the public-private partnership, design-build paradigm in use today in connection with government and other facilities. More specifically, Nelson designed the structure and drafted all related documents in connection with the creation of credit tenant lease bonds for a public-private waste transfer facility and a private company’s headquarters and manufacturing facility. In each case, Nelson acted as a principal in bond creation and then resold the bonds to institutional investors. Each of the transactions was among the earliest commercial real estate single asset securitizations.

Nelson then went on to create his development-as-a-service model in commercial real estate where he structured the first rated, insured and publicly traded off-balance sheet financings of public-private-civil society partnerships (P3s) developing public facilities. Nelson structured, designed, financed and developed three welfare office projects at a cost of approximately $145 million and gave away the residual value of the projects to impacted communities through not-for-profits he administers to this day. These early P3 efforts became the prototype for an industry of design-build-finance- operate-manage projects around the world in the years following. Nelson personally designed, developed and currently oversees the above referenced projects to effectively privatize risks and socialize profits — later P3 efforts did the inverse. The projects were the first application of Nelson’s prosperity-centric model and required long periods of negotiation and education of rating agencies, bond insurers and underwriters. Nelson is bringing this same structure, process, and creativity to the creation of Blokable’s Housing Development-as-a-Service model.