Today we’d like to introduce you to Craig Braham.
Craig, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We founded Advocate Commercial Real Estate Advisors in 2003 with the idea of focusing exclusively on tenants looking for Chicago office space. Our business has grown to serve clients nationwide and now includes a Detroit presence in addition to our offices here.
From the beginning, we’ve been 100% employee owned. Because there are no outside investors, we’ve never had to shift our core focus — creating real estate strategies tailored to each client, developing additional services, and investing in our team — to drive short-term results or make year-end quotas. The principals who own our business are still personally involved in every transaction, each bringing over 20 years of commercial real estate experience to bear on their projects.
Though we are well-equipped to serve clients in range of industries and professions, we’ve seen our strongest growth in legal and professional services and with technology companies and other entrepreneurial ventures. Our business model resonates with leaders in these industries: lawyers and accountants are very sensitive to the whole notion of conflicts of interest, for example, so they like that we only represent tenants and never landlords. Start-up companies appreciate that we’re lean and nimble, like they are, and that we understand the challenges of competing against bigger companies.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Nobody who worked in real estate through the 2008 financial crisis can say that the road’s been entirely smooth. We’ve certainly seen some dramatic swings in the market over the course of our relatively short history.
The biggest challenge for us, though, has been the consolidation in the commercial real estate sector: our competitors have been gobbling each other up, building themselves into these giant national concerns, representing buildings and landlords all over the place while also acting as tenants’ brokers. They can spend a lot of money marketing the idea that they’re “full service,” as if that’s an advantage for all their clients, when what that really means is that they can be on both sides of a transaction.
Our message, that we focus solely on the tenant with no fiduciary conflicts, is a great message, but our business model also means we run with low overhead costs, so we don’t have a huge advertising or sponsorship budget.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Advocate works on behalf of tenants seeking commercial real estate. Like any broker, we sit down with our clients and review their current space and what their future needs are. We talk about who their employees and customers are, how they work, and what kind of image they want to convey through their workplace. What sets us apart, though, is that we are sharply focused on our clients’ financial results and their economic goals, so that’s a thread of the conversation from the beginning. It’s not just about, “what can you spend?” We’re looking at all the possible terms that might go into a real estate deal: how long is the lease, how much flexibility does it give you, what options will you have if your business changes dramatically.
We assemble dedicated teams for each client: bringing together just the right mix of project managers, technical specialists, architects and others to identify potential locations and work through how those locations could be adapted to serve the client’s current and future needs. Every project we do is a significant investment for us, so we treat it that way and, as a result, we’ve become known for providing a level of personalized service and expertise far beyond our competitors tend to offer.
We’ve structured our company so that our financial interests directly line up with those of our clients. One of the things we’re most proud of is our unique compensation structure: We do not accept “bonus commissions” above the market based level, and our clients control 100% of the commission paid by the landlord.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
With Advocate, we’ve very consciously built a company where our clients’ success is our success. That reflects how I’ve personally come to understand success, too. It’s not about how well I do in competition with or comparison to others, it’s about what I can build.
If I’m doing the right thing for my clients and the right thing for my partners and employees, that translates into success for me. And if I can achieve that success with the business while also having a great family life and enjoying myself, then I’ve truly got everything I could want.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.advocateadvisors.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdvocateAdvisors
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChiAdvocate
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/97713/
Image Credit:
All photos courtesy of Advocate Real Estate Advisors
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