NAI Global recently revealed that during 2017, it added 15 new office locations and that those investments are already beginning to pay off. Nine of the new locations are in U.S. markets, while six of them are international. The New York-based firm also reported that the number of closed transactions between multiple offices grew both in numbers and volume, which is now in the billions of dollars annually. Globest.com caught up with NAI Global President Jay Olshonsky for the background on the firm's recent successes and his outlook for 2018.

GlobeSt.com: We noticed from your company press release that all of the new domestic offices are in secondary and in fact, mostly tertiary markets. What is the thinking there?

Jay Olshonsky: Each office has its own story and why we wanted to be there. However, investors are fairly agnostic in terms of looking for yields – they will take them where they can get them, and we're here to help. I'll give you a couple of examples to your point about tertiary markets. In Charleston, we no sooner opened that office when one of our managing directors from our Bend, Oregon office, NAI Cascade – Andie Edmonds, completed a $42 million industrial/mixed-use acquisition there, representing a New York-based investor. She did that deal with a pair of NAI Charleston brokers. The attraction for the buyer in that deal is a robust Charleston industrial market because it has an inland port. We also opened an office in little-known Weirton, West Virginia (NAI Ohio River Corridor), because one of our brokerage groups specialize in property sales and leasing associated with the plastics and energy industries. That region of the country has a number of companies that manufacture or exports raw product like fertilizer that are associated with those industries.