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Sperry Van Ness International Corporation is a sponsor and exhibitor at the upcoming 2013 CCIM Live Conference. This 2-day event will be held October 25 & 26 at the Sheraton Downtown Hotel in Denver, Co. Learn from seasoned experts as they share their secrets to success in today’s CRE market. In attendance from SVNIC will be Diane Danielson, George Slusser, Bo Barron and Karen Hurd.
*All Sperry Van Ness offices are independently owned and operated.
SVNIC will also be hosting a live “CRE Tech Tools” seminar on Thursday, October 24th in Denver, Co. Come join us for tech talk and complimentary cocktail reception and learn more about how you can use LinkedIn, Twitter, online publishing, CRM and other tools to grow your business as well as learn about the Sperry Van Ness® franchise platform. For additional details or to register, CLICK HERE.
*All Sperry Van Ness offices are independently owned and operated.
This week, our Office Spotlight focuses on Sperry Van Ness | First Guardian Group based out of San Jose, CA
1. What has been your strategy for growing your firm and also your market share?
Our Silicon Valley location gives us exceptional access to many wealthy people who are interested in diversifying into real estate. We offer a full services approach that includes ongoing management of real estate investments through our in-house property management team. We have developed deep expertise in assisting our clients with obtaining attractive financing, completing 1031 exchanges, and assisting them in turning around troubled assets.
We have also developed skills in working with specialized ownership structures such as Tenant in Common (TIC) and Delaware Statutory Trusts (DST). This knowledge and experience provides us with significant differentiation that sets us apart from most commercial real estate companies. Finally, from day one, we have embraced the Sperry Van Ness philosophy of collaboration with other commercial real estate and management firms and split fees and commissions with other brokers in order to broaden our resources to better assist our clients. Through collaboration with other brokers, we are also able to expand our services nationwide and offer our clients “best of class” resources outside of local area. Our affiliation with SVN two years ago has proved to be a highly successful move to increase our branding resulting in two of our most successful years. Through SVN, we have also developed many new friends and business associates that have generously shared helpful ideas with us leading to greater business success.
2. What are some of the unique activities you do to motivate your team?
Nothing unusual. We treat all of our employees as insiders and fully share details of all deals in our weekly staff meetings. We also provide bonuses to employees for every closed transaction plus annual bonuses based on our annual net profit. We celebrate our successes with special lunches and have a refrigerator that includes chilled champagne that is shared on each closing.
3. What’s been the biggest challenge on how you run your business over the last few years?
Finding good talent. We are competing with some the best, highest paying companies in the world and finding and retaining good people is our biggest challenge. We have been very fortunate to recruit excellent people who have a passion for commercial real estate and have been successful in retaining them. However we have also experienced undesired turnover which causes us to be constantly thinking about ways to keep our current folks happy and also attract talented new people.
4. How many Advisors/Staff did you have when you joined SVN? How many (in total) do you have now?
We have generally maintained a core staff of about 8-10 people at our corporate offices. However we manage several hundred service providers across the US who work closely with us on various projects in addition to working with many third party sales and leasing agents across the US. Through frequent conference calls and use of screen sharing and video via WebEx, we are able to significantly expand our resources and develop a close-knit large team that greatly expands our capabilities.
*All Sperry Van Ness® offices are independently owned and operated.
Happy New Year! While we wait for the official Fourth Quarter 2012 results to be compiled, I can attest to (and almost guarantee) that sales activity in the retail shopping centers sector flourished as sellers rushed to complete sales by the year’s end. Special servicers, lenders and distressed property owners were the primary sellers; users and opportunistic buyers were the primary buyers. Annual figures are expected to show an overall increase of total sales in terms of dollar volume compared to 2012.
Distressed retail assets sold not on cash flow, but the demographic markets price per square foot comparables. Traditional sales (that of non-distressed properties) were primarily Class A anchored assets. These properties traded almost exclusively among the private and publicly traded REITS. Lack of inventory of stable retail centers in core markets demanded cap-rates not seen since 2005.
The expectation for 2013 is more of the same, as billions of dollars in loans become due and property owners find themselves unable to replace existing debt because of shrinking property values resulting from reduced rents and/or loss of tenants. In addition, the economic and governmental debt crisis uncertainty will play havoc on tenant expansion, job growth and lender motivation. These conditions will once again drive sales as investors look to commercial real estate for yield and the belief that real estate values have reached bottom.
Shari A. Tucker-Gasser
National Director of Retail
Sperry Van Ness/dba Sperry Van Ness, LLC
*All Sperry Van Ness® offices are independently owned and operated.
My new iPhone 4s arrived finally arrived this past weekend. My oldest son and I opened the package with much anticipation and we immediately dropped what we were doing to configure the device. Among the many new features made part of the 4s is Siri – the speech recognition device which, as Apple advertises, “Understands what you say, knows what you mean, and takes dictation.” So, gone are the days when I have to manually type a query into Google to search for a nearby Sushi restaurant, find directions, or, get this – type to text or email. From now on, all I have to do is talk. So, over the weekend I dictated and had Siri read aloud roughly 100 text messages sent and received. I quickly grew so accustomed to iPhone dictation that I became annoyed when I had to manually type an email on my Mac later that evening. On one hand, I felt more efficient, on the other hand I questioned if I was simply becoming lazy…
Separately, as a CEO, I am constantly striving to predict the future and react to it in advance. Not only with respect to positional real estate strategies, but also in terms of adopting (and creating) new intellectual technologies – which extend mental capabilities and enable us to gain more information faster. So as a fan of applications in this category, I’ve researched and adopted as many CRE and non-CRE of these intellectual technologies as anyone. I use Dragan Dictation to dictate most of my laptop writing, regularly use Loopnet to create space surveys, view comps, and get a read on the market. SVN Advisors are LoopNet power users and many are subscribers to CoStar, including their CoStar Go iPad app, which allows you to take real estate data into the field, where you can even view detailed tenant information, including lease expiration dates without having to charm past building security or receptionists. And all of this has me thinking – are the convenience applications mentioned above changing the way I learn, eroding at certain skill sets, and making me less knowledgeable?
While I can say with reasonable certainty that my IQ remains the same since becoming an early adopter, my ability to easily become immersed in the analysis of raw research data has eroded. In addition, my typing skills aren’t what they used to be and my spelling skills, thanks to auto-correct, have gone from good to average. For those of us in CRE (or any other field for that matter), what role have research products played in the reduction in the amount of market research that we retain? Posed another way, are the CRE practitioners of yesteryear, who had to physically walk building floors, drive every property in their area of focus, conduct live courthouse research, etc., more knowledgeable than we brokers of today?
Are we becoming dependent upon these resources because we’re lazy, or because we need to in order to remain competitive? I’m not making a value judgment here, I’m just asking you to do a gut check – Do you use technology to advance your learning, or to fill a knowledge gap? The distinction between the two is subtle, yet important.
The human brain is malleable. It is capable of being reshaped and while I don’t know the answer to the above questions, I do know that my mind now approaches learning a bit differently. My mind now expects to receive information the way that Loopnet feeds it to me – instantly, and with little effort. I have made it a personal challenge to add to my cognitive skills rather than replace them. This has required me to slow down in the short run at times, but in the long run I feel as if I’m expanding my knowledge base, not shrinking it.
So, I ask – has our “encyclopedic knowledge” of CRE markets and beyond become artificial intelligence? Are Loopnet/Costar and the like making us stupid, or are we better off? I think the answer largely depends on approach and motivation. Thoughts?
– Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO & President, Sperry Van Ness International Corporation
*All Sperry Van Ness® offices are independently owned and operated.
