Noel khalil the top 100

Noel Khalil: The Top 100 Noel Khalil has had a long and successful career, and he is being recognized now as one of the most prominent businessmen in Atlanta. The Atlanta Business Chronicle has named him to its annual list of the top one hundred commercial real estate professionals in the city's metropolitan area.

The Chronicle highlighted his strategic planning and development operations with his company, Columbia Residential, as well as the alliances he has forged with local communities, nonprofit CDCs, financial institutions, government agencies, and public housing authorities.

"I keep the company's culture fresh," he says, "and make sure that it's being maintained. I'm involved in strategic planning for the company, and I still play a major role in business development."

Noel Khalil founded Columbia Residential in 1991. Its original name was the Affordable Housing Partnership, and its original focus was on developing affordable housing projects for low-income people and senior citizens. The company eventually added a property management corporation and a construction arm, and by 1995 had changed its name to Columbia Residential. Today he employs 272 people and has an annual payroll of thirteen million dollars. "Additionally," he says, "between our real estate development activities and property management operation, we have an annual economic impact of more than one hundred million dollars."

Noel Khalil says that he owes his success to his parents, who are Jamaican immigrants who came to the United States before he was born, in search of a better life. And he owes it to a high school guidance counselor who helped reinvigorate his interest in education, and set him on the path that got him into college. He earned a degree in Education from the University of Rochester, and did graduate work in city planning at Georgia Tech. He also worked for U.S. Home Corporation building apartment complexes in Houston and New Jersey.

He says that he also has a debt of gratitude to Herman Russell, a leading African American real estate developer who hired him and began mentoring him during the 1980s. The two men cofounded the Gibraltar Land Company in the 1980s, developing numerous commercial properties.

Being named to the Top 100 list by the Atlanta Business Chronicle was a crowning achievement.

"Sometimes I take time to reflect on Columbia Residential, and what it's achieved," Noel Khalil says today. "The point that I take from [there] is that the greatest sense of pride that I have is how we have created an environment for people to achieve, and to be recognized and rewarded for those accomplishments."