Broker Profile: Senior Vice President Brandon Keith (San Diego)
In this issue of Voit’s “Meet Our Professionals” Broker Profile Series, we highlight Brandon Keith, SVP/Partner, of our San Diego office.
The path to a career in commercial real estate is not always a straight one. For Brandon the course he had envisioned for himself took several serendipitous turns that steered him into CRE. Turns that led him to a 30-year career and being a top producer for Voit.
“I’ve always loved hotels, and I wanted to be in the hotel industry. I worked at the Holiday Inn in Mission Valley all the way through high school, so I thought hotel management would be my career path,” says Keith. He enrolled in the hotel management program at UNLV after high school graduation. But by the end of his sophomore year, Keith decided that his study focus was too narrow. Wanting a more well-rounded education, he returned to his native San Diego and began working towards his business management degree at San Diego State.
It was the early 90s, the world was in a recession, and job prospects were bleak. Some of his friends in Vegas had gotten real estate licenses and were “killing it.” So, he earned a real estate license to create additional opportunities for himself in the challenging economy. While driving one day, Keith saw a sign for a commercial real estate company. The firm was seeking college grads with real estate licenses, and he remembered that the company had previously contacted him.
“At that point, I only knew about residential real estate. I didn’t know what commercial real estate was,” Keith recalls. “So, I called these guys, and they brought me in and told me what they do. I thought it was interesting. So, pretty much by accident, I spent my last year of college working for a small, full-service commercial real estate firm. And once I was in it, I was bitten by the bug.”
Early Career
Following graduation, Keith joined GVA IPC Commercial Real Estate, which specialized in industrial leasing and sales. He remained there for a dozen years. In 2007, he and five other partners — with a combined 120 years of experience in the business — formed their own full-service, advisory-based brokerage firm, Commercial Realty Advisers (CRA). “I was the managing partner and the broker of record, so I wore two hats,” says Keith. “I ran the company and was also a broker, so it was really an extraordinary period of time. There was a lot of responsibility and a lot of work. And then, in the summer of 2008, the (real estate) market crashed, and the stock market crashed shortly after that. It was a challenging and scary time for our industry.”
By the start of the global financial crisis, CRA had grown to 25 brokers and had become a top 10 CRE firm. CRA remained profitable through the GFC. “We ran lean and mean. We sat in the bullpen with the rest of our agents, and we were closing deals and doing business despite what was happening around us,” explains Keith. “We also had good bank and lending contacts and were able to get a lot of foreclosure business, which kept us going.”
In 2010, global CRE firm Grubb & Ellis did not have an office in San Diego. CRA was now the largest unaffiliated brokerage in San Diego. Keith and his partners were tired of running the business, so they negotiated a lucrative deal to become the Grubb & Ellis San Diego affiliate. He was now free to focus solely on brokerage with the bonus of having the name recognition of a national brand. The relationship lasted for two years until BGC Partners acquired the assets of Grubb & Ellis to form Newmark Grubb Knight Frank (now Newmark).
Coming to Voit
Not willing to accept the terms offered by Newmark, Keith and four of the original CRA partners began interviewing with other firms before signing on with Voit in 2012. He has never looked back. “Voit was the closest company to what I had been used to for my career — not a big, corporate national [firm]. You could work whatever markets you wanted to, and you weren’t forced onto a team,” says Keith. “It was more like a family, which is how we had always run our companies, from IPC to the Commercial Realty Advisors, with summer parties, incentive trips, holiday parties… it’s really just more of a fun atmosphere. It was what we were expecting, and it’s turned out to be a fantastic move.”
During his 30-year commercial real estate brokerage career, Keith has completed a wide range of sales and lease transactions totaling more than $1.2 billion across the spectrum of office, industrial, R&D, and medical properties. Since joining Voit, he has been a consistent top producer and made partner. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors. Keith specializes in helping business owners take control of their real estate costs by advising them on acquiring their own assets, investment sales, and leasing. He recently assisted an Illinois investor in acquiring a fully leased, 48,571 SF multi-tenant office building for $9.8M — nearly $2M under the asking price. He also partnered with Randy LaChance, EVP/Partner, on the $17M sale of a 54,000 SF two-story office building in San Diego.
Career Experiences
One of Keith’s laments during his early career development was a lack of mentorship, a practice Voit has long championed as a key to success. “Unfortunately, I was not mentored. I kind of stumbled into the business, and I was never paired with a senior broker who could really show me the ropes,” says Keith. “That was a big detriment that probably set me back five or six years compared to brokers who did start with a proper mentor. But the flip side of that is I had to figure everything out myself. So, by the time I was ten years in the business, I could run circles around guys who’ve been in the business for 15 or 20 years because I’ve had to do all the nitty-gritty details of the business myself.”
One of the things that has helped him immeasurably in the business is being a commercial property owner himself. He purchased his first property when he was in his mid-twenties and says it has made a huge difference because he has personally experienced all facets of the process. “I’ve signed leases, paid commissions, made tenant improvements — and I’ve had tenants bomb out on me after I’ve done all that. I’ve had to sue tenants who don’t perform, I’ve done 1031 exchanges multiple times and signed loan documents 30 times,” says Keith. “I’ve done all these things I’m going to be asking [a client] to do. So, when I talk with property owners, I talk to them as a peer, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a question I couldn’t answer.”
Like other successful brokers, Keith cites “the ability to work hard” as the key ingredient to success in the business. “You have to work until eight or nine at night five days a week and work on Saturdays when you’re starting off in this business. There’s really no other way to do it,” he says.
Work Hard, Play Hard
However, working hard also gives him the ability to play hard. A drummer since grade school, he has played in a working band for the last 14 years. “We practice once a month, and we’re pretty serious about practice,” says Keith. And with the kids off to college, he and his wife are now on the “travel train.” This summer, they went to Paris for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime, really cool event to do. But now that we don’t have any kids at home, it’s just the beginning of our travel adventures.”
Travel also allows him to indulge in his earliest passion — hotels.
“I still love hotels, but in hindsight, as a hotel manager, your work week is basically 14- to 16-hour days, Thursday through Sunday. So ultimately, I’m glad I didn’t pursue that pathway,” says Keith. “I thought that was going to be my career, but it turns out that I just loved buildings.”
Additional broker profiles are scheduled over the next few months. Check back to see who we highlight next.
