It's Poaching Season For Big CRE Brokerages In South Florida

A war for commercial real estate talent is brewing in South Florida. 

Four major brokerages — Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers, Avison Young and Savills — have replaced or appointed new executives to run their South Florida operations in recent months. In announcing the hires, all the firms highlighted a push to recruit top talent.

“I see a real movement taking place right now among brokers — the actual producers and the really strong brokers,” said Donna Abood, the recently recruited vice chairman and co-head of the Florida region at Savills. “They want something different today.”

Abood is looking to poach some of those brokers to fuel Savills’ expansion in the region, but so is nearly every other major brokerage in the country. 

The shift of brokerages south is not necessarily new, but local leaders said it was supercharged by the rapid growth the region saw during the pandemic. While the migration has waned, South Florida's commercial real estate continues to outperform much of the country.

“Every broker wakes up in the morning scratching their head and asking the question: Is the percentage that I'm giving back to the house worth it?” said Pike Rowley, who started Avison Young’s presence in Florida in 2012 and grew the firm to 200 local staff before semiretiring in 2021.

Brokers are known to be more likely to hop firms when markets get frothy and uncertain. The nation’s largest brokerages are making their pitches around South Florida, hoping to steal away top-performing brokers and teams with experience in a market that has shown remarkable resilience. 

“We're talking to some big teams and hoping that we can get some of them over the goal line,” said Lisa Jesmer, the recently appointed Florida market leader at Avison Young.

Jesmer is aiming to grow Avison Young’s broker roster in the industrial space after Wayne Schuchts, a top industrial broker at the firm, was hired away by SRS Real Estate Partners to launch a new South Florida industrial practice.

She is also looking to push into the healthcare space and grow the firm’s retail presence by leveraging its recent acquisition of Madison Marquette’s retail division.

Jesmer also kept her title as the national director of investor services and business development at Avison Young. She said she sees her promotion as crucial to not only filling the vacuum left behind after previous head Randy Buddymeyer was let go in May 2023 but also to serve as a conduit connecting her national and institutional client base that wants to open new outposts in the region.

It’s a similar strategy being pursued by Cushman & Wakefield, which recently sent a New York executive to spearhead its South Florida operations.

Joseph Caridi was put into the role last month, before he had even found a place to live in Miami, with the firm making clear his job was to connect New York firms to South Florida brokers. 

“Known as New York’s sixth borough, South Florida has seen significant migration from the Northeast and Joe is a perfect example of that trend in action,” Roberta Liss, Cushman & Wakefield’s president of the Southeast region, said in a statement announcing his new role. “His background in New York and deep familiarity with our business and clients along with his proven track record for recruiting leading talent sets up our South Florida region in a great way for continued growth.”

Caridi said in an interview last month that besides bringing NYC firms to Florida, his focus would be on recruiting new talent, saying that he thought the firm “was only scratching the surface” in South Florida. 

“With the right leadership and the right people, brokers and collaboration, I really believe that we can knock the cover off the ball,” he said. 

Instead of focusing on New York, Colliers plucked an executive with a nationwide track record to come in and lead the South Florida market. 

Dustin Ballard, who in June was named Colliers’ managing director and brokerage market leader for South Florida, spent more than a decade working on the brokerage and investment side in markets like Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Nashville. 

Colliers recruited him from Tricera Capital, a Miami-based real estate investment firm, where he arrived during the pandemic. This new opportunity was practically fated to be after Colliers first tried to bring him on in California, Ballard said.

He remembers driving across the country with his dog to meet his family at their new South Florida home when he got a call from Colliers, which was looking for a Silicon Valley market leader at the time.  

Now firmly settled in Miami, Ballard said his top priority at Colliers would be to recruit. But instead of whole firms or teams, he is looking for specific people who can fill gaps in the firm’s service lines.

Colliers announced its first strategic hire on Tuesday, bringing on Zach Feldman as a senior vice president focused on retail assets working out of Boca Raton. Feldman, a 13-year veteran of the industry, had been a senior director at Katz & Associates, a boutique firm with a presence in seven cities. 

The firm’s relatively solid financial footing — it posted annual gains in revenue and profit in the first quarter — means Colliers can attack its growth in Miami more strategically, Ballard said. 

“Just having that mentality of not having the pressure of just hiring heads to grow revenue — being very specific, targeted and methodical in how we evaluate acquisition opportunities — that’s what sets us apart,” he said. 

Savills is making the biggest push for growth in the region, where it has until now had a relatively limited presence. Abood said the firm is looking to grow from eight brokers to as many as 49 in the next five years. 

“Recruitment, branding and production are my highest priorities,” Abood said. “The first issue on recruitment is huge because the other two will follow.”

She is looking to fill out an existing office team with industrial, retail and capital markets brokers, along with the staff that supports them. That expansion is likely to involve some acquisitions, she said. 

“We're looking at the second guy in line who's really great, but he's kind of being overshadowed by the first guy,” Abood said. “There'll be some of that happening. Boutique firms would be ideal.”

The new leadership appointments come as South Florida becomes an increasingly important market for the overall commercial real estate sector.

Before the pandemic, Miami typically had less than 1% of all job listings on the job board SelectLeaders. Through the first half of 2024, 5.3% of all jobs posted were in South Florida. 

“If you were to do a study of the last 20 years of brokerage leadership in South Florida, you would find, in the last 10 years, a pretty consistent revolving wheel,” said Rowley, who won a lifetime achievement award from NAIOP in 2022. “Prior to that, it was fairly static.”