source: bizjournals.com
Mark Scott’s career in commercial real estate has taken him through four recessions — but the good times are good enough to keep him coming back for more.
In his new role at the Jacksonville office of Graham & Co. LLC, Scott is the senior director of the industrial group, where he’ll get the firm ready for those good times on the horizon. He’ll be handling sales and leasing of industrial buildings and land.
“When it’s going great, this is a really, really fun business,” Scott said. “But you have to take the bad along with the good.”
Jacksonville’s industrial real estate market has certainly seen enough of the bad. The vacancy rate hovered around 11 percent for all of 2011, but that was still a slight improvement over 2010.
“I think there are certainly things trending in the right direction, that things are getting better,” he said. “I think it’ll continue to be a slow recovery.
“Everyone likes to say a rising tide floats all boats, and maybe if Miami continues to do better, the major markets continue to do better, apartments do better, and it bleeds into retail, and single-family housing, if the office market is really doing better, eventually everything will get better.”
He said Graham & Co., which is headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., sees the end of the downturn as the perfect time to get in the game. Managing broker Peter Crolius handles both office and industrial properties, but with the addition of Scott, Crolius will focus on office properties while Scott heads the industrial group.
“It was a good time to get involved, and I was already here,” Scott said. “They were already into it, but having essentially a one-man shop, they couldn’t cover everything as much as they’d want. In time, as we pick up some volume, we’ll wind up bringing one or two more brokers on board.”
Scott has been in commercial real estate since 1989, when he started with the Jacksonville office of CBRE Group Inc. CBRE Group Inc. Latest from The Business Journals Follow this company He’s worked for a number of other firms since then, and most recently was with Cushman & Wakefield of Florida Inc. Cushman & Wakefield of Florida Inc. Latest from The Business Journals Apartment bubble not likely in the near termWellCare adding jobs in new lease spaceBiz Digest Follow this company
At this point in his career, he said he prefers working with a smaller shop over a national flag.
“It’s all a personal preference, and what you choose to do,” Scott said. “With one of the big national companies, it’s very corporate, very button-down, and there’s a lot of silos in those companies. …. I think when you have those types of environments, a smaller shop gives you an opportunity to do more things.”
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