Outside-the-box Successes for Real Estate Teams

Matt Waters: Hello and welcome to The Lease Alert, where we have conversations with the smartest, most interesting people at the intersection of real estate, leasing, and accounting. 

On this episode of The Lease Alert, real estate broker Alec Wynne tells us how he used accounting knowledge to close the biggest deal of his career. And now his passion is mentoring the next generation of real estate professionals, especially women and minorities. 

I'm your host, Matt Waters. Let's learn something together. Alec, welcome to The Lease Alert.  

Alec Wynne: Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.  

Matt Waters: Me too. And I have to tell everybody as we're getting started here, this is not the first time that Alec and I have presented together. 

We've actually taught a couple of classes at CoreNet. We've taught the same class two times - real estate's impact on financial statements. I really enjoyed talking with you during those classes and [hearing] the stories that you have related to that topic. And I thought it really fit well with our subject matter here. 

I'm excited to bring you to our audience as we get started here. Alec, how did you make your way to becoming a managing broker at Sky Commercial?  

Alec Wynne: Thanks, Matt. That's a question that I get sometimes, and I forget how quickly the years go by because it just seems like yesterday. I just started in the business and so I started in 1994. 

I just graduated from UCLA, which is my alma mater, and I knew that I wanted to be in this business. I started in West Los Angeles and that's where I got my career started. I quickly realized that unfortunately LA was not the place where I wanted to raise my family. Just too many negative things associated with being and living in LA as a young 20 something. 

I just fortuitously happened to have a discussion with the managing director at that time who ironically moved to Denver. As I was just fighting to move away from LA, I was actually heading to the East Coast to be a pharmaceuticals rep. He had called just on a whim and said, hey, I know you didn't have a good run in LA - would you consider Denver?  

I said, yeah, sure. I'll check it out. And the two gentlemen that I apprenticed under, we just hit it off. I took a leap of faith and moved to Denver and set up shop here. I started out as a broker consultant for the first part of my career. Then as I matured in the industry, I was always enamored with the role of the managing broker. 

It's always been in the back of my mind, is that something that I could do? That was the first question. Then the second question was, could I do it for a large company?  

Everything that I've done in my career has a madness and a reasoning behind it. My first goal was to be a top broker consultant, and I achieved that goal. 

Then the second was to become an expert in terms of helping Fortune 500 companies manage and advise them on their real estate portfolio. I learned from someone that was very, very good at doing that. I learned the ropes from my mentor and then I figured out how to do it on my own. 

Then after I achieved that, the next goal was, could I become a managing broker? I sought out counsel from people that had been in those roles and positions. And it's funny, the first thing that someone will tell you that's been in this role before is it's like managing a big family. 

It's like if you have four kids, well, now you have 24 kids, 20 brokers. There's a lot of managing. There's a lot of refereeing that goes on and it can get political at times. You have to know how to build relationships and manage people as they are. It's been a huge learning curve for me in that capacity. 

But I believe that there are other things in this business, to be a good managing broker, you should know. I have been a broker consultant at some point, just to see what it's like to be a broker, what it's like in their day to day lives. I think that helps you as a manager. So long answer to your question, but that's the evolution of how I fell into this role. 

I think I'll probably finish up my career in this role.  

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Matt Waters: Great. You say fell into it, but it really does sound like you were quite strategic. It's setting the stage to fall into that role, right? That's excellent.  

I mentioned up front, Alec, that we met at CoreNet and we were both teaching. I think I can assume that your commitment to CoreNet has been pretty longstanding. You obviously demonstrate that by teaching in the MCR, the Master of Corporate Real Estate program and attending conferences, but I wanted to dig in a little deeper on that with you and ask about CoreNet and professional organizations in general, how have those contributed to your career?  

Alec Wynne: That's an easy one, Matt. For CoreNet, I love the organization. It has really honed my skills as a professional and my giving back to the CoreNet community as part of the faculty is just one small way of saying thank you to CoreNet. 

In addition to some of the mentorship that I got along the way, I began to advise more and more corporate clients, I realized that I needed some educational support and that is where CoreNet became huge for me. The things that I've learned in the coursework as I got my MCR, I tell one of my favorite stories in two of the courses that I took during the program were very instrumental in helping me with one of the largest transactions that I did in my career and that was moving a corporate headquarters for a fortune 500 company.  

For me CoreNet has pulled a special place. My parents always taught me to appreciate everything in life and especially those who helped me along the way. The organization of CoreNet was helpful in rounding out my education in terms of being a good broker, advisor and consultant for my clients. 

I've been a part of several national organizations, professional trade organizations, and I think CoreNet's one of the best, it's always seeking to improve. It's always seeking to be inclusive, which I think is important. I'm grateful because when I think about some of the transactions I've worked on, I wonder if I wouldn't have been able to navigate those transactions had I not had the educational component. That's part of me and my advisory work and some getting my MCR. 

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Matt Waters: That's fascinating that you say that, Alec, because in this season of the podcast, I've talked with another individual who has a prestigious degree, like you, UCLA, that's an impressive degree. The other individual had an MBA from Harvard and both of you are saying that professional organizations actually were key milestones in your careers. 

She's a CPA and a Harvard MBA, but her big break came as a result of taking part of an initiative through the AICPA, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. You are talking after UCLA and tons of experience, some big breaks in your career came as a part of being a member of CoreNet and participating in education. 

I think that's great. I think we're kind of picking up on a trend there. But I have to ask you the story that you mentioned about that big milestone deal, is it related to some of the content that you learned about through the MCR program at CoreNet? Can we dig in a little deeper on that? What happened there? 

Alec Wynne: I'd be happy to. Like any large transaction, it takes a really long time to close them out. I had this transaction that was in front of me, I was kind of stuck. I knew key factors and drivers about the C suite. One of which was they were having trouble recruiting talent. If you follow some of the trends of the workplace, no secret, the war on talent is real. 

I would say about real estate now is - 30 years ago, it was location, location, location. Then as you got into the early two thousands, it changed to labor, labor, labor, but that was driven by call centers and technology. And now it is absolutely about labor, labor, labor, from the standpoint of, can you attract and retain the talent? 

Because the big tech companies are all chasing some of the same talent and offering different perks to join their organization. But I would say across the board, since the effects and the aftereffects of the pandemic, most companies are concerned about how they attract the talent and retain the talent. 

I knew that was a big issue for the C suite. They were struggling with a brand that was deteriorating, I would say. And their current location here locally was hidden. Like a lot of companies, everyone knew of the brand, but they didn't even know that they were located here in Denver.  

I had conveyed to the real estate person to then convey to the C suite. Hey, you guys suffer from a brand elevation issue. A lot of folks didn't even know your headquartered here. We’re thinking about that as we're looking to determine what we're going to do with your headquarters. The project started I believe in 2010, and then we had a couple of iterations along the way when they thought about moving their headquarters, but then they decided they didn't want to do it for a variety of reasons. I really felt I wasn't trying to do this transaction for the sake of doing a transaction. I really believed that they needed to make a move for a number of reasons. It was one of the courses was how real estate impacts the financial statements. Then it was coupled with that and the Kaplan course that's offered from CoreNet.  

Light bulb! It just went on after I took “how real estate impacts the financial statements.” One of the things I knew that the CEO was keenly concerned about was how could he get his stock price up? 

I studied how much we would potentially save the company by doing a headquarters move. I figured out how many cents per share it would equate if we could execute on certain milestones. I basically wrote an executive briefing after taking both of these courses. 

I thought about all the things I had learned about working with this company, because at that point in time, now I fast forward to 2016. I had to work on this assignment for five years. I couldn't get them to move.  

After looking at everything, I wrote an executive briefing, I think it was probably a page and a half or so, and I'll never forget this day because it literally changed my life, financially, because it was a monster transaction. That would have been November of 2016. 

I wrote the briefing, delivered it, and then in January of 2017, I got the call from the head of real estate that said, the CEO loved your briefing. You have a green light to move our headquarters.  

I thought I was dreaming. It took me. In our profession for the audience to do a transaction that is up 100,000 square feet or larger is a major milestone. It's like winning a major in golf, right? If you can achieve that, you've won your first major. If you do it multiple times and you've got more majors.  Once you do one, then you kind of get pushed in this space of this person can now execute at this level when the other opportunities come. You have a higher chance of owning that business.  

But I tell the story because I want to tell the younger generation - it takes a long time to do these big transactions. You also have to be thinking outside the normal proverbial box, if you will. And that's that creative thinking. That's what really wins the day now.  

When we're competing for new assignments, how do we differentiate ourselves from our competitors? A lot of it is the questions that we ask and the way in which we present the materials, because we're always mindful of who the receiver is. 

There's generally four different folks or types of people that'll be looking at our information. Could be the legal person, it could be the real estate person, it could be finance, it could be the C suite. We always try to, when we write something, we don't just deliver it to the head of real estate. We're thinking about the CEO, we're thinking about the CFO. And HR and legal.  

Matt Waters: That's incredible. I love that story just because so many times we sit in classes all of us have in high school and college and these professional organizations like CoreNet, we sit there and sometimes the temptation is to think, “well, this doesn't apply to my job. I'll probably never use this again.”  

But here is a very clear example of a time where the real estate impact on financial statements class actually allowed you to put a bow on this biggest deal that you had ever had in your career, right? It's something that you literally learned in a classroom that has you thinking down that path, but you also combined it with the other class. 

It sounds like it might've been elements of the class Workplace Strategy Essentials at CoreNet as it's part of that MCR program. Actually for me, I went through that recently. That was one of the ones that was more challenging for me. And my background is a CPA and finance and accounting my whole career. 

That workplace strategy class, it was less hard, hard math. More like, “oh, well, what will the perception of this be and how will employees feel about that and how can we ultimately drive in today's environment.” It's about a lot of companies wanting to drive the behavior to have people come back to the office, right? It might not be the actual space. It might be more of the perks that are involved, right? That class is just so out there for me.   

I love hearing your story and that it all comes together, and particularly, I have not taken the capstone yet for my MCR, but that's my next class. I can see how that's going to be just fascinating to see all of this material woven together. Then ultimately, as your story shows brilliantly, it can cause a big effect on your career.  

Alec Wynne: I really care about it. I think as I listened to you play back some of those soundbites for me, the other thing that comes to mind is it's the validation of your thinking from other leaders, experts in our space. The capstone course that did that for me, because hearing from three or four different heads of real estate and there's case studies that you'll be studying and working on that they actually dealt with and seeing how they dealt with them, the problem solving that they did, it really validates, my thinking as an advisor, because when you're in leadership capacity, you can question your own thinking. 

I know for me, I didn't always know how to move a corporate headquarters. Trust me, I didn't execute very well in my first try, so you've got to be willing to fail. That is one of the messages I want to convey because I've always been a risk taker. My mom has pushed me in that space when I was young. 

She would tell me that you have a way of leading and people are going to rely on you. That could be a tough thing for someone to grapple with. As I got to know, I guess you could say my purpose and what I was meant to do, I became more and more comfortable with it. 

But it doesn't mean that sometimes I don’t question, well, am I on the right track? Is this strategy sound? And that's the benefit of being in a trade organization, like CoreNet where you can be a part of the organization. You can learn just from that working and then you get the additional component of the coursework that it offers. 

The educational content it's definitely helpful, but hearing from others and how they solve problems and knowing that it's very similar to the way in which I've dealt with some problems and I've had similar solutions, it gives you just more confidence to know that others are thinking like you and solving similarly, that is helpful to hear. 

Matt Waters: I wholeheartedly agree. I'll just add that you'd meet the greatest people at those events too. You really can make some good friends and business contacts along the way. When you learn, when you're participating as a student, and then also when you, as you have done, give back as a teacher and faculty member there, that they really go so far and you meet people all the time.  

It really takes a little bit extra effort to develop a friendship or make somebody more than an acquaintance, right? That can happen inthe course of a three day, two day project. Intense conferences like that can really be a good format for those vital contacts.  

If my math is correct, you've had a successful over 30 years in commercial real estate and, some transactions along the way that equate with winning a master's you've done well. 

But I know you, you're still out there gunning every day. You're up early. You're getting after it. I have to ask you, what is your top passion now? After all of those years, what still has you coming back and keeps you going?  

Alec Wynne: Thanks for asking that. Now, I would say three things. One is just the competitive spirit that I have when you win a major. You want to win another one, I can tell you that.  

Secondly, I just love what we do. I love solving problems. I love helping our clients. I really do have a passion for helping people. I just happen to help people in real estate. Solve real estate problems. There's that.  

Then I think the third thing is what keeps me going now is giving back to the community, the greater community. When I started in the business, I tell folks, it's kind of a funny story, but it's a sad story at the same time. I started in ‘94. There were five African Americans in the business and my first goal was to be the number one person of color. It wasn't a big goal because there were only five of us. After a year and a half, I achieved that goal. I thought any new goal was just a blanket can I make it to the top 50 broker advisors? I achieved that and then I just kept pushing the envelope along the way. 

I realized that oftentimes I was the only one. And so that was part of the reasoning for me wanting to be a managing broker. Because when you're a managing broker, you control the hiring. You're in a position to hire and provide mentorship.  

Matt Waters: You're saying you were the only African American in, in a certain deal or at a certain table or certain level? 

Alec Wynne: At a certain level, yeah. The more success you have as a broker by as a producer, you tend to have a little more influence. Once I got to the higher levels of brokerage, there just wasn't very many people of color. Especially on the manager broker side, I believe, and depending on how you look at it, it was just the reality of the industry. 

But when I became managing broker for Avis and Young, which is a international company that was in back in 2012.  

At the time, I was the only managing broker of color in the state of Colorado. On the commercial side. I'm the only one managing an office for a multinational/ international commercial real estate company. 

To answer your question, I'm really passionate about creating opportunity for other people of color and women to come into this business. There weren't very many of us when I started, we have added some talent in recent years.  

I mentioned there were five. Now there's only 11. There's been some growth, not a lot especially in, in a span of 30 years to go from five to 11 is not a big growth for it.  

People ask why is that? And I think it's because a lot of people of color don't know that this is a career choice. We're not at trade fairs, job fairs. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to get the word out that, hey, you know, this is a way that you can earn a great living. You can create some wealth along the way.  

I'm really passionate about mentoring and bringing more along into the business. Even though there's only 11, the thing that I'm very proud of is that six of them are in our first. 

We have a pretty dominant market share of the talent pool in that space and we're always looking for sharp people. I fully expect to double that number by the time I'm done, I'll feel really good about making a dent in that arena.  

We're not just focused on people of color; we're focused on women as well. On our team right now, we have two women and we're about to bring on three more.  

We're very intentional about it, very strategic about it. I’m looking forward to the future and seeing how these folks matriculate into the business.  

Matt Waters: That's fantastic. I know I speak for the industry when I say thank you for your contributions there and your commitment to mentoring and it's been lived out over years and years. We can see in the commitment to giving back through education and teaching and mentoring, one on one and providing jobs. Going all the way through to to the actual opportunity. I will just say thank you on behalf of our audience and the profession. 

What a a great contribution you're making in Denver and really nationwide, I would say. I know we haven't had much time to talk about the reach of your brokerage and your company, but it does go beyond Denver. Thank you for that. 

Alec, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Really a pleasure talking with you as always. 

Alec Wynne: Thank you. But this has been great getting to know you and teaching with you. Thank you for thinking of me to be a part of the podcast.  

Matt Waters: Thank you for listening to The Lease Alert. I'd be grateful if you would like and subscribe wherever you listen. Until next time, keep learning and leasing!