Franklin Street’s Greg Eisenman, Regional Managing Director in Atlanta, recently spoke with Focus about the challenges and opportunities in the Atlanta real estate market, highlighting the firm’s ability to adapt and support its clients amidst market fluctuations.
View some snippets from the interview below.
What are some highlights from the last 12 months?
Franklin Street is known for its extremely collaborative culture and being a fun place to work. These traits have never been more apparent to me during my time at Franklin Street than they’ve been over the past year, due to the extraordinarily odd characteristics of the market. There are a lot of different factors impacting day-to-day transactional work and the services we provide, including the well-documented interest rate hikes and costs of labor and construction. From my viewpoint as a broker with a focus on retail tenant representation, construction costs remain at high levels, and with the current interest rate environment, the way both tenants and landlords are approaching capital is very different from a year ago. These are just some of the macroeconomic factors that, when combined, create a challenging environment. Within our Atlanta office, and throughout Franklin Street as a whole, we’ve experienced an increased need to innovate and create additional value for our clients and to help guide them through obstacles that are new to them.
It is no surprise that the Atlanta market is no different than many other major metropolitan areas across the U.S., whereby the office real estate market is seeing elevated vacancies. Our mindset at Franklin Street is to lean into the difficult times, confront them head-on, and invest in ourselves and our platform during this time. We view times like this as an opportunity for our clients to win big in the long term if they approach the current challenges in the appropriate ways. We believe strongly, that even despite the general office segment struggles, we are actively recruiting within our office division and preparing ourselves to capitalize on the great opportunities we see ahead in that segment, among others.
We have seen a lot of big real estate firms downsizing, whether via layoffs or due to changing office/cultural dynamics that lead brokers to feel like they need to make a move. We have been fortunate not to experience such departures, and we will continue to work tirelessly to grow and show the market that when times are tough, we can still support our people and invest in them even more, ensuring that we can continue to solve whatever challenges get in our way.
How would you say you are incorporating sustainability into your services?
Franklin Street’s core nature is one of sustainability and balance, so we are just continuing to operate the way we know: Our firm has a best-in-class commercial real estate insurance platform, which is a major value add and point of differentiation for a lot of the recruits that we are trying to bring in from a brokerage standpoint and for prospective clients. Our strength in the insurance division adds a unique dynamic to the value proposition we provide to our clients and one that not many of our competitors can match.
Including insurance, we have seven different business lines. When certain industry sectors are on a downswing, it’s our expectation that others are secure, predictable, and dynamic.
How do you tailor your strategies to fit the needs of each client?
Plain and simple: we listen. We are a client-centric organization, and ultimately, our job is to help our clients achieve and exceed their goals. Listening sounds like a simple premise, however, we see competitors and colleagues fail to listen to their clients on a regular basis. We tailor our services to each scenario our clients encounter. Each client will have a different set of goals and will need a different strategy of how they want to reach those goals.
Read the full article here from Capital Analytics Associates.
