Up Close With David Luther
In the Houston investment sales world, David Luther is a big fish. Under his leadership, Marcus & Millichap's offices in Houston and The Woodlands reeled in 135 deals last year. Since taking over in 2011, David's grown the offices' top-line revenue by a factor of 3.5x. We sat down with David to find out how his unique management style plays into Marcus & Millichap's productivity.
David Luther grew up in Houston, graduating from Cy Fair High School. He got his degree in math and real estate finance from SMU, where he met his wife. David was hired by Marcus & Millichap right out of college. He moved to the hot South Florida market, where he began working as a researcher.
David quickly learned it was the brokers who were making all the money. Luckily for him, a Marcus & Millichap manager, Gene Berman (who’s still with the firm), saw David’s potential. He told David he was smart enough, but needed to develop selling skills. Gene taught David a lesson that has stuck with him to this day; you’re either selling or being sold.
The timing of David’s new career in brokerage wasn’t great; he started in 2001, shortly before the tragic events of 9/11. That first year was one of the biggest challenges David has ever faced. For almost a year he wasn’t making any money. His fiance, who at the time was a manager at Banana Republic, was the breadwinner.
David credits much of his success to the strong mentorship culture at Marcus & Millichap (and particularly Gene's guidance about discipline and sacrifice).
Now he's striving to further that environment of collaboration as Marcus & Millichap’s managing director in Houston and the Texas district manager. He’s built a “team of teams” culture where teams specialize in different assets and geographies. The collaborative environment directly affects the bottom line as a team passes work to another when a client is looking for a different asset class. Agents are also encouraged to bring buyers to each other's deals.
To counteract brokerage's natural inclination to competition rather than collaboration, David aims for alignment, not agreement. That means providing incentives that further the business, not just the individual, and ensuring there's enough opportunity that you don’t have to steal from others. He shies away from recruiting brokers with money as the primary incentive. That may get them in the door, but to get them to stay, he says you have to give them tools to grow their game and have a sustainable business, despite what happens in the market.
David’s management style paid off big time earlier this year when Marcus & Millichap brokered the sale of a 21-property portfolio (including 13 Houston assets) consisting of 5,995 multifamily units. The deal had plenty of challenges (like years of deferred maintenance), requiring collaboration between his TX IPA agents and senior M&M agents in various markets. His team also procured the buyers, an institutional group that purchased a small subset of the original portfolio, and several other private investors.
When he’s not working, David is all about his family. He has three kids, Hope, 11, Tripp, 8, and Georgia, who’s just over three months old. Every year, David and the family go on an annual ski trip. They're crazy about baseball, too. He makes sure to visit the ballpark in every city he visits. He most recently visited Fenway. Having lived in Houston most of his life, he's a BBQ and Mexican food junkie—you can often find him at Killen’s or El Tiempo. But David's favorite thing about Houston is its diversity. He says it's home to people from around the state, nation and globe that all want the city to grow and succeed.
