At just 32, Nic Paolella is helping to lead his family's company – from the position of Executive Vice President – toward an ever-widening scope of opportunity in the local community.registered for a third-year real-estate course at the University of British Columbia more than a decade ago, his professor quickly realized that he was not your average neophyte student trying to get a handle on this whole property-development thing.
Paolella had grown up in the business after his father, Marco, while waiting to get into welding school in the mid-1980s, found himself starting a construction business out in what was then the relative wilderness of the Fraser Valley. That company,, who noted that it’s not uncommon for him to get the children of prominent developers in his classes. But most of them, unlike Paolella, have been “not stellar,” in his experience. So Somerville arranged for Nic to get into a graduate-level course with one of Vancouver’s most famous city planners,Many years later, that combination of real-world experience from his family and the more academic world of urban planning is Paolella’s foundation as he has slowly moved into the leadership ranks. Now, at 32, he is Executive Vice President and the occupant of a nice corner office on the 15th floor of a downtown Class AAA office building where Marcon has one of its two offices. (The other is in Langley.) And that is taking him and the company to new places as he expands far beyond what Marcon started as: a basic construction company doing a pile of suburban and ex-urban housing.Marcon isn’t the biggest developer in the province. In the various lists generated about BC’s top-producing developers, it sometimes doesn’t place at all or, as with one compiled by REW two years ago, it came in eighth among the cluster of familiar names like Polygon, Anthem, Bosa, Concord Pacific, Intracorp, Cressey, and Westban