Chris Maguire, CEO and co-founder of property brokerage SRS Real Estate Partners, has weathered several ups and downs in retail real estate during his 40 years in the industry. He feels a new shift coming on.
Retailers are looking for real estate that can both serve shoppers who want to come into stores as well as those who want to order from home. The firm is gearing up for more growth, with Garrett Colburn approaching his second year as president while SRS has added 46 brokers throughout the United States in the past year.
"We've got a little wind at our back for the first time in 15 years in a strong way across the United States. It's an exciting time and Garrett's really been focused on driving the growth. We are riding that wave, and we are recruiting throughout the country, building our teams and offices."
It makes him hark back to when his retail real estate brokerage was taking off in the 1990s, but the driver then was big-box chains such as Walmart and Target driving specialty retailers like Circuit City, CompUSA and RadioShack out of the industry. Then the Great Recession dealt a blow to retailers before they rose again — this time through e-commerce — in a wave that continued through the pandemic and is still a part of shopping today, he said.
Before that industry up and down, Maguire co-founded SRS Real Estate Partners in Dallas alongside NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach in 1986, "and my job was to build a retail division," he said. "Retail used to be just merchants that built big boxes and filled them up with inventory, but as we got into the 1990s, we had category killers" like large retail chain superstores, he said.
The Dallas-based brokerage, which rebranded from Staubach Retail Services to SRS Real Estate Partners in 2009, has grown over the past four decades to 30 offices with commercial real estate services spanning retail, industrial and capital markets. Maguire took some time to chat with CoStar News about the firm's next evolution. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does this play into new development and future retail space?
We are starting to see new retail development, but it was just dormant for a long period of time. For a 20- to 25-year period, we added 40 to 45 million people in the United States, and they're all shopping at the same stores. The cost of construction has been a big barrier for people with those costs rising and the retailers not really expanding. Now, costs are still expensive, but retailers have to grow to serve this growing population. And now, a retailer can't just build a box for customers to shop in, they need to offer a showroom environment with on-site fulfillment.
Along with offering real estate services, SRS is also a developer and owner. How is artificial intelligence changing how the firm conducts business?
Everyone's pouring money into AI, and we've built out a proprietary system on our end that we are implementing across the country and on all platforms. It's coming along extremely fast, as everything is in AI, and it's really exciting to see the efficiencies that are gaining along the way already. AI gives us an opportunity to scale further and leverage our resources and our people to be more client-facing and less administrative throughout the lifecycle of a deal.
What's the biggest regret you've had over your career?
I wish we could've hired Garrett 20 years ago instead of 15 years ago. I wish we had opened an office in Boston 20 years ago, but we didn't, we opened it five years ago. And it's doing fantastic. And now we have to think about how we can give our brokers who will walk out of this office door, get on the elevator and head home and hope they come back the next day. Because they are our assets. At the end of the day, we have a culture that's unique and people come here because it's a place they want to be around.
What advice do you give young brokers?
Go absorb from the best brokers in the office. That's the great thing about our culture. Somebody can walk into my office whether they've been here two minutes or 20 years. If I can help you, I'm going to help you. Learn and put in the hard work because those that are successful have done that, and they're going to gravitate toward those younger people that prove they want it and are willing to do the hard work, roll up their sleeves and get in there. You have to have that mindset in this business.