GlobeSt.com: How are you going to balance this with your day job? Is it like taking a sabbatical?

Mike Hillis: I have a team, and there are three of us, and with iPads and email, you never totally lose touch. It will be some pressure on our little organization, but I have a couple really good partners who recognize the benefits of participating. One of the things that comes back is referral business from all of the contacts that you're making around the world. That's been a great source for business. Our particular market, Las Vegas, is in-bound referrals. We don't have a lot of corporate headquarters other than gaming companies to ship out to other markets, but everybody wants to be in Vegas, so there's a significant amount of that kind of activity. This gives me some better opportunities to have some exposure to participate in that.

GlobeSt.com: So how much does the organization mean to your business and other members?

Hillis: If you're in the brokerage business, it is the gold standard. I've done a lot of business outside of our own market. My partner and I have done a lot of sale-leasebacks around the country, so when you do that and are not licensed in the state, you really need to hook up with somebody there that you trust, understands what you're doing and is not going to have any kind of negative impact on your client relationships. In every case that I went out of state, I hooked up with an SIOR, and in 40-some transactions, I have never had a bad experience. That bodes for itself. If you want the true top professionals in a given market, the SIOR list is the best one you can use. It's a two-way street. With every one of those situations, you create a new relationship, and with those people we have done business with in other markets, they know us and our team, so when they have something in our market, there is no question who they call. That relationship building is invaluable.

GlobeSt.com: Will there be anything new this year that will be a big topic of conversation?

Hillis: We've got a lot of new initiatives at SIOR. Our demographics are such that we don't have a lot of young people in the organization. We've made a real concerted effort to build our young-professional program. And this year we introduced a candidate program to give young folks that may not qualify for their production numbers yet, a chance to get those numbers where they need to be to join. That's a new energy effort. The other thing that we've done is focused on a lot of the national companies and networks to encourage their folks to join the organization. That demographic has changed pretty dramatically over the years. It used to be an emphasis with independents being the bulk of the organization, and the major firms were the smaller number, and that has just flip-flopped. We're seeing more consolidation in the industry and a lot more international firms and networks recognizing the need to get outside of their own little family to get out there and do business.

GlobeSt.com: You're in Las Vegas. Has the recovery started there yet?

Hillis: Las Vegas was really the epicenter of the real estate recession. Housing took a bigger hit than virtually any other part of the country, and it impacted commercial transactions as well. We just recently did a report for a proposal that we are putting together that shows in Las Vegas, since 2009, 60% of all commercial transactions have been what would be classified as distressed assets. In other words, they were loan-servicer-controlled or foreclosed properties. With that activity, it was probably more than 30% to the next closest market, so we really took a hit. The good news is that the freefall has stopped. Lease rates are stabilizing and vacancy rates are flattening out. We were on a pretty downhill slide for a long time. Now we're bouncing on the bottom and the big question is: How long is it going to take to start seeing recovery? We've got a big enough inventory of vacant properties to last us for a few years at normal absorption rates, but we're not back to normal yet. We're just getting positive. So it's going to be a slow climb to get out of the recession, but the good news is that we're heading North instead of South.