CHICAGO—On Monday, GlobeSt.com reported that Chicago-based Champion Realty Advisors had just become the Chicago office for Fischer & Company. Today, J.D. Salazar, the founder of Champion, explains that smaller firms such as his increasingly need the scale and tools provided by bigger firms like Fischer.
“It's becoming harder for the smaller shops to successfully win business,” he says. “When I started in the business in 1985 or '86, entrepreneurs still controlled a ton of real estate; now it's all these massive REITs. This trend has been going on for awhile, but it has accelerated in the past three years.”
And these big players increasingly need someone who can get not just a good deal on the rent for a single 100,000-square-foot distribution center, but also figure out ways to optimize procedures at, and extract savings from, a portfolio scattered across 100 locations with buildings of up to 1,000,000-square-feet. Although Salazar has often represented some of the most influential industrial developers and users in the US, including Prologis and Ozburn-Hessey Logistics, that work typically came Champion's way due to the personal relationships and trust he had built up with these clients.
“They like me a lot, and certainly relationships are the foundation of what we do; but at the end of the day, they're going to want a service provider who can do more than transactions.”
And that's where Fischer comes in, he adds. The Dallas-based firm has about 200 employees nationwide, whereas Champion usually had about five. More importantly, Fischer brings with it several proprietary technology platforms, such as ManagePath® and CRE Enterprise™. Through these, Fischer provides portfolio management, strategic planning, construction management and many other services.
“It's very beneficial to us to have the ability to provide all of these services.” And although Champion could have bought similar software tools off the shelf, Salazar says those options “were not nearly as powerful as the Fischer platforms. They've had 30 years to refine their software.”
Salazar has assumed the title of executive vice president, managing director of Fischer & Company - Chicago. He also plans to staff up the office with brokers that focus on several sectors, including industrial, office and retail. However, the growth will be careful, as he wants to make sure all new hires value and understand both the type of personal relationships that built Champion, and the technological abilities of the Fischer platforms. "It's not going to be an overnight process."
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
