Excerpted from Florida Trend’s Florida 500, a special section that highlights the 500 most influential business leaders in different economic sectors throughout the state.
Andrew Wright
MANAGING PARTNER & CEO, FRANKLIN STREET, TAMPA
Wright, with a bachelor’s degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, established the company in 2006 and steered it successfully through the economic downturn. It has become one of the fastest-growing commercial real estate firms in the Southeast.
Wright, whose grandparents emigrated from Colombia in the 1950s, envisioned the firm as a “vertically integrated business encompassing the entire life cycle of an asset” — the firm offers services ranging from financing to insurance to property management, landlord representation, project management and development. “I’ve always enjoyed the fact that real estate is tangible. You can touch it, feel it, see the impact of it, and that has always appealed to me. Another interesting aspect of the industry is that the amount of land we have right now is all we will have. We cannot make any more real estate, so the scarcity of resources and their utility have also been very attractive to me,” he says.
His toughest challenge, he says, came in 2008: “I was 27 years old and there was no way I could have prepared for or even understood how vast the financial collapse was. It touched every industry, and it was a difficult time.”
For full story, visit https://floridatrend500.com/real-estate/andrew-wright/
