Up Close With Steve Bryant

Energy Tower IV is about to deliver and Mac Haik Enterprises director of leasing Steve Bryant has three tenants locked in. We sat down with the man who’s 210k SF away from leasing up a 2M SF campus. (That should be easy. Remember the old real estate saying, "the first 1,790,000 SF are the hardest.")

Steve's dad was a recreational real estate developer (think: lakes, golf courses) and his cousin, Ben Bergeron co-founded Hanover. After Steve graduated from North Texas State in 1980, Ben introduced Steve to Al Pardoe, and Steve worked at Pardoe Development for 10 years. He saw Al as a father figure, and had a blast building 13 office and warehouse projects in five years. After powering through a recession, he joined KD Management in 1989, leasing a 6M SF Texas portfolio for Ray Driver's life insurance clients.

Steve (here with wife Melissa) joined Mac Haik 2.5 years ago and has been focused on leasing Energy Plaza. In fact, the hardest deal of his career was there, leasing the full Energy Tower III building to Technip in 2013 before it delivered. Energy Tower IV, the final building in the 2M SF Energy Plaza campus, is slated to deliver soon. Steve has three leases in hand, leaving 210k SF available. (Energy Towers II and III are fully leased.) He says there aren’t as many large leases in the market as 18 months ago, but there’s a lot of activity in the 15k to 25k SF range, and he’s got some of those deals working.

Steve’s motto: “Do what’s best for the real estate and everything else will take care of itself.” It’s on his bucket list to visit every state; only Maine, Idaho, and Oregon are left. He and Melissa are talking about a trip to Idaho soon. He’d also love to play Augusta National. In the meantime, he loves to golf and fish offshore with his four sons. (And based on these pictures, he also loves to take Melissa out to eat!)