Stepping Into CRE Brokerage

Howdy y’all, it’s been a minute since we last published and that’s because there were some major life changes these last few months for me. For starters, I’m no longer a research analyst, so I’m spending less of my days in the weeds of spreadsheets.

As of September, I’m officially full time into brokerage which means I’ll be able to share on this platform a lot more of what is actually happening in the CRE world of Austin through my own experience. I’m excited to bring the last year + of data collection and analysis into practice through brokerage.

That said, I thought now would be a great time to share more about my journey to real estate brokerage and what it is I’m focused on as I enter my first true year in the business here. Let’s dive into it.

How It Started: I grew up in the DC area where I went on to swim at the University of Delaware. While there, I was working on obtaining a coaching science minor that required me to get an internship during the summer as a swim coach. My professor challenged me when I told her I already coached for 3 summers at that point as an assistant to my Dad to go find another team. Grateful for that push, I ended up at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, MD.

That club has served me in so many seasons, especially when I found myself a year out of college, unsure what I wanted to do in my career and welcomed me back as their Head Swim Coach. It was through this experience I was first exposed to commercial real estate. Of the 220+ kid team I was tasked with leading, a lot of those kid’s parents were brokers or significant players in the DC real estate market. As I later got into fitness coaching, those parents became my personal training clients and I started to get a good sense of what kind of people they were. It wasn’t surprising that they were some of my favorite people to work with, I just didn’t know it at the time why that was.

Fast forward 5 years, after doing a quick stint in LA to live at the beach with two of my childhood best friends and starting my own fitness company, Forever Athlete, I found myself in Austin, TX.

Fresh off a failed startup endeavor, I felt it was time to go back to the drawing board and pivot into a long term career that allowed me to capitalize on the skills I had acquired in those 8+ years of professional experience.

Insert those former favorite clients.

I finally called them up and asked if they were willing to share more about what they actually did for a living. Growing up the son of two teachers, I wasn’t exposed much to the world of commercial real estate so it always felt confusing to me when they talked about work during our lifts. I listened to what each of them had to say about the pros and cons of the industry and prepared myself to start shaking as many hands as I could here in Austin to see if it were really right for me.

Commercial real estate is often a tough industry to crack into, so networking was hard at first. But thanks to some introductions from my DC connections and the use of Linkedin, I was starting to get some meetings, but I was told there weren’t any available positions with where the market was at the time almost everywhere I turned.

It wasn’t until I found an ECR for lease sign that I called up the hiring manager and sent an unsolicited cover letter/resume that I landed my first interview. I learned later that my proactive approach coupled with some lucky timing was what made the opportunity even possible. Something I’m seeing a year later to be even more true with how to actually be successful once you’re in the business.

Where do we go from here:

What I’m most excited about brokerage is this career affords me the flexibility to educate, coach, and create solutions for those I work with. It blends a multitude of skills that I’ve cultivated over the years and gives me a chance to meet some fantastic people along the way.

I’m looking forward to helping growing companies, specifically those who have a direct impact on the local, grassroots community that is Austin’s backbone. I want to be the voice and advocate for the mom & pop shop getting started for the first time with no idea where to begin. I want to be the advisor for the startup founder who’s too busy running their business to make stress free real estate decision that allows them to get back to the truly important work. Above all else, I’m curious to learn more about adaptive reuse and placemaking, helping make communities a better place through real estate.

I plan to use this blog as a place where I share my learnings in real time, breaking down the curtain that is the complex world of commercial real estate to make it more accessible.

You can expect to see tenant and building case studies, projects I’m actively working on, as well as the insights that you’ve come to know this page to provide.

Here’s to a new chapter of growing together,

Cory