For many successful brokers, playing competitive sports as a youth seems to be a prerequisite. Juan Gutierrez, Executive Vice President and industrial specialist in the Ontario office, grew up playing soccer, a sport he was so passionate about that he spent his final semester of college at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, just to be closer to the game being played at its highest level.
“I went to Spain because I grew up playing soccer and I’m a big fan,” says Gutierrez. “I played it in college, and after I was done playing, I decided I wanted to go to Spain for a semester, but it was mostly so I could watch live soccer games.”
Spain is home to elite soccer leagues, including La Liga, the top tier of the Spanish football league system, known for global powerhouses like Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. FC Barcelona was the first professional team for Lionel Messi, who in May was named the GOAT (greatest of all time) by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS), supplanting the legendary Pelé. “He (Messi) was a 17-year-old coming off the bench, and I was there to see it. People knew he was going to be great, but I don’t think anyone knew he was going to be what he is now.”
The Formative Years
The son of Mexican immigrants, Gutierrez was born and raised in Santa Ana. Although he did not grow up with a direct connection to real estate, his dad was a construction worker, and his mother worked in various office positions in the banking end of residential real estate. He attended Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana—a sports powerhouse that produced three Heisman Trophy winners (Matt Leinart, John Huarte, and Carolina Panthers QB Bryce Young) and multiple professional athletes across the sports spectrum. Gutierrez was a standout on the soccer team that ranked #2 nationally during his senior year.
“I was always super competitive, playing travel soccer (a highly competitive, development-focused, and demanding form of youth soccer) and stuff like that,” says Gutierrez. “When I was young, I just thought I would keep playing soccer for the rest of my life. I thought I would eventually go pro, but when you’re young, you don’t really know the real world.” He was also a good student (“A’s and B’s”) and went on to UC Riverside to play college soccer—“That’s the reason I picked that school,” he admits—and earned a degree in business administration.
Unbeknownst to Gutierrez at the time, his competitive nature and coachability, which developed through years of soccer competition, would serve him well in his career in CRE brokerage.
Introduction to CRE
Like many college students, Gutierrez was uncertain about his career path following graduation, but commercial real estate was definitely not on his radar. “I was just taking courses to meet my academic requirements so I could play soccer, but I had no idea what I was going to do or what I was preparing for,” Gutierrez recalls. “I knew people made a lot of money buying and selling houses, and I even took a couple of residential real estate courses in college, but I don’t think I even knew that commercial real estate existed.”
What eventually sparked his interest in CRE was largely serendipitous. “When I was a senior, I was living in Riverside, and I’d be driving around, and I began noticing all these warehouses being built. I remember seeing real estate company signs on the sites, so I just started calling some of the companies,” he says. The cold-calling efforts landed him a handful of interviews with brokerage firms, and he was hired by CB Richard Ellis for their Ontario office right out of college.
He began his career in 2006 in CBRE’s two-year runnership program, “where they pay you very little” to keep overhead low and to weed out those who are not a good fit for brokerage. “You can kind of make your own path and see what it is you want to do,” says Gutierrez. “I got partnered up with a couple of guys in that office that were doing just industrial out in the Inland Empire, and that’s how I got myself into that business. I wish I could tell you a good story—that I knew it was going to happen that way—but I just think it was blind luck. I just happened to be in the right area at the right time, and I’ve literally lived through the boom that we’ve experienced over the last 20 years out here [in the Inland Empire].”
Despite his modest appraisal, it hasn’t all been “blind luck”, as Gutierrez earned CBRE Regional and National “Rookie of the Year” honors in 2008, and has been named one of the top industrial brokers in his market by CoStar since joining Voit in 2010. He also received Voit’s Highest Designation of “Executive Vice President” in 2021.
Voit Presents Opportunity
In 2010, Gutierrez and his brokerage team (including the now 40-plus-year veteran and Executive Vice President Walt Chenoweth) were recruited by Voit to open an industrial practice in the Inland Empire. “It was like working at a startup,” says Gutierrez. “We were working out of an executive suite for the first year while they prepared our office, and a lot of our clients out here didn’t really know much about Voit, so it took a few years [to build a brand identity]. We now have 15 or 20 industrial brokers in the Inland Empire, and we’re well-established.”
Becoming a Successful Broker
Early in his career, Gutierrez benefited from the tutelage of senior brokers, particularly Chenoweth, who emphasized the importance of paying attention to details. “Walt was always very thorough. I tell people that it was almost like having an attorney working with you because he reads everything so carefully,” says Gutierrez. “He knows the lease documents and the purchase contracts inside and out. He’s very detail-oriented, and that’s something that he helped me with, because I was not very detail-oriented when I began my career.”
Gutierrez is involved in all facets of industrial brokerage: tenant and landlord representation and land and investment sales. In April, Gutierrez represented the Alere Property Group in a 256,795-square-foot building lease at 23850 Brodiaea Avenue in Moreno Valley to an e-commerce user. More recently, he represented owner Link Logistics in a pair of full building leases in the Willow Business Park, a 57K SF lease at 455 W. San Bernardino Avenue and a 47K SF lease at 389 W. San Bernardino Avenue.
Earlier this year, he represented the owner in the $8 million sale ($326.53 PSF) of a 24,500-square-foot industrial building to an owner-user. He sold 44 acres of land, located at Ethanac Road & Case Road in Perris, CA, to a real estate development company (Richland) that will entitle the site for an industrial building and develop it once the market conditions become more favorable. In addition, he is representing Brookfield Properties on a 275,560-square-foot warehouse they are developing in Fontana. (Gutierrez and his team sold Brookfield the site back in 2021).
Gutierrez credits much of his success as a broker to his participation in sports. “I think a lot of the things I learned from playing soccer translated into this business,” he says. “You have to compete every day, and you have to show up with a good attitude and enthusiasm. For me, those are guiding principles.”
Additional broker profiles are scheduled over the next few months. Check back to see who we highlight next.