Excerpted form CoStar News story.
Bob Boyd, a 30-plus-year veteran of commercial real estate who has run regional offices for major brokerage firms, has seen several real estate cycles in his career, and the longevity of the current one continues to impress him.
“I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing,” said Boyd, who is several months into his new job specializing in equity placement at commercial real estate services firm Franklin Street. “As long as the Fed keeps interest rates down, this cycle will continue for some period of time.”
Boyd is one of the bigger names in Atlanta commercial real estate. He’s a past president and chairman of the Atlanta Commercial Board of Realtors and founder and past chairman of the Realtors Commercial Alliance of the National Association of Realtors.
For more than a decade in the late 1990s, he served as the district manager of the former Grubb & Ellis’ Atlanta office. He left Grubb & Ellis, now part of Newmark Knight Frank, in early 2000 to kick off the corporate services group of St. Joe Co.’s Advantis Real Estate Services. Later, at JWB Realty Services, Boyd secured capital for investment in and development of retail, residential and industrial properties. In Doraville, Georgia, he helped finance Peachtree Pavilion, a 167,488-square-foot shopping center adjacent to the Assembly mixed-use development that is home to the new Serta Simmons Bedding headquarters. He has represented institutional and private clients including American Express, Capital One, Bank of Montreal and Reynolds Aluminum.
Boyd joined the Atlanta office of Florida-based Franklin Street as a director on its capital markets team in October, after working eight years at competitor Bullock Mannelly Partners. Boyd said he made the move to Franklin Street because of the additional opportunity it presents.
“It just made sense to bring my skills to a bigger group,” Boyd said in an interview.
Boyd’s been busy at his new job helping raise capital for development and investments. The challenge is finding ample opportunities for clients, he said. Investor appetite is especially high for student housing and senior housing and for certain retail, hotel-and-resort, office and industrial properties, he said.
“There’s plenty of money in the system, but there are fewer quality developments and fewer quality transaction opportunities,” Boyd said. He expects to complete his first deals at Franklin Street in the next two or three months.
As for Atlanta, the city’s population and job growth have flipped investors who in the past bypassed the metro area, Boyd said. “Now they’re asking, ‘What do you have there that we can take a look at?'” Boyd said.
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