Brooke Harlander

What we talked about

She picked Austin before she ever lived here

Most people arrive in a market because life put them there. She arrived because a spreadsheet pointed at it. St. John Properties has grown nationally through a partner in training program, and part of the deal is that you will eventually leave to open an office somewhere. So she spent her rotation years studying where.

That meant business-friendly growth markets, cold calls, networking, reports, and hours inside CoStar looking at vacancy, absorption and rents for one specific product type. Texas surfaced. Then Austin surfaced out of Texas, because new product was getting absorbed quickly and rents were strong. Then she came and looked at neighborhoods, met people, and decided it was somewhere she wanted to raise a family too.

Four years of rotating, then you go

She started at the company as a retail leasing agent and joined the partner in training program, which rotates a candidate through every department in the business: development, construction, leasing, tenant improvements, property management, marketing. Very few people finish it. She was the most recent graduate of it when the company promoted her and sent her to Texas.

Not the prom queen anymore

This is the most useful thing in the interview for anyone entering a new market. Back home, the brand did the work. People picked up the phone, knew how the company transacted, and had played golf with her colleagues for twenty years. Here, none of that transferred.

She is social and extroverted and expected relationships to come easily. What she did not expect was how hard it would be to get basic information. Brokers work on commission and are focused on deals that are actually transacting, and she had not paid anyone a commission yet. She had not earned the phone call.

Her framing of that period is generous rather than bitter. Some decisions were made with incomplete information and some lessons got learned, and the model is still being refined to meet the market. Being in improve-it mode instead of being the favorite was humbling, and it took longer than she thought.

Talking to cities before buying land

When she got here she did not find a site, buy it, and show up at council with a site plan. She met with cities first, explained the company's history and product type, and then bought where those cities said they wanted it.

That included saying no. Where a city told her its priority was grocery-anchored retail, her answer was that it sounded like a great program for someone else, because it is not what her company builds. Where she has done well is in communities transitioning out of being bedroom suburbs, that want commercial on the ground for their own small businesses and want it to look like more than a metal building.

The product is flexible enough to serve a quasi-retail user, a full office user, or light manufacturing, and suites start small enough that a neighborhood business can be the tenant. Her point is that the headline corporate deals are exciting, but the growth has come from local operators who want a class A option without driving into the city.

Williamson County, and where she is looking next

She describes tripling down in Williamson County and has multiple projects across Georgetown and Leander, calling Leander a genuinely good partner. She is also learning the areas south and east of Austin, deliberately driving markets she does not know yet, because in her read a community can change in six months.

The relationship building runs ahead of the transaction on purpose. She knows people in cities where the company owns nothing, because someday there may be a piece of land worth calling about, and she would rather that call go to someone who already knows the company and has seen a project delivered.

Her actual research method

She came in with no bias about anywhere, which she calls an advantage. She studied the demographics, drove around, formed a theory about a market, and then said that theory out loud to everyone who would listen, specifically so that people would push back on it. Disagreement was the point. That is how her opinions got built.

She applies the same discipline to received wisdom. When someone tells her a permit will take eighteen months, she does not take it or dismiss it. She puts a pin in it and goes to find out whether that was the process or whether something specific to that project went wrong.

What she wants from a city, and what she gives back

Her ask of a jurisdiction is not approvals. It is information and a response. If a reviewer tells her something is in the code and cannot be done, she can work with that, because she knows where she stands and can go solve the problem. What breaks projects is silence: no call back, no feedback, no explanation attached to the no.

She is also unusually fair to the people on the other side of the counter. Code changes constantly, staff turns over in fast-growing cities, issues arrive that nobody anticipated when the code was written, and a reviewer's job is to enforce it. Then they have to do that while dealing with developers who are, in her words, a little high strung.

So she runs the public policy committee for her commercial real estate association, and one of the things it does is local code reviews. Architects, engineers, developers and landscape architects who have actually worked in a jurisdiction read that jurisdiction's code and send back comments. Nobody has to take the advice. It just puts the development community's experience in front of the people writing the rules. The committee also has to sort a genuine industry-wide problem from one company's bad week, which she treats as part of being a credible advocate.

Service, defined precisely

Everyone in real estate says they offer service. Her definition is specific: responsiveness, communication, timing, and setting expectations. The concrete version is that design work is done in house, so a small tenant does not have to go hire an architect, and with a national portfolio of thousands of clients she can pull half a dozen examples of how similar companies laid out similar space and run it through permit.

The other half is what happens after the lease is signed. One point of contact, one phone number, for the length of the term, instead of chasing seven people across ten years. And she will not set an expectation she cannot meet in order to win a deal, which sometimes means telling someone the deal is not right.

Landing somewhere new while starting a family

The part people do not see is that she was six months pregnant when the family moved, which meant leaving every friend she had at exactly the moment she was starting a family. What made it survivable was the industry itself. Real estate people are in the trenches together, working the same problems, and there is a social layer to the business, so real friendships came out of contractors and consultants and colleagues.

She quotes the rising tide lifting all boats and then adds the part she actually cares about, which is having your friends in those boats. Doing business with people you like is, in her account, both the best outcome available and the thing that makes a long career possible. Anyone can grind out three months with someone they cannot stand. Twelve years is different.

Work that outlives you

Asked what it is like to do work that has a physical form in a world where most work does not, she says that is what drew her to real estate in the first place. Having an impact on something that will literally outlive you, assuming it is good product, is the appeal.

But her favorite deals are not the big ones. They are the couple who took the risk of starting something and are finally ready to move the business out of the house, where she gets to be the first call, show them space, and sit down and walk them through a lease they have never seen before. Or the logistics operator who had a brand book and a concept for a quick-serve hibachi restaurant and no experience running one, who got open and has done well. She remembers his branded floor mats arriving.

Which is why she keeps saying it is not about the buildings. It is about who ends up in them.

An open door, whether or not you are a tenant

The most generous thing she says is close to the end. Her team prices projects, runs comps and evaluates sites constantly, and she will share that with someone who is not going to lease from her at all, because they are in the market and need help understanding a process or a number. It is caveated honestly, in that what she knows is shaped by the product type her company builds. But the offer is real, and it is clearly a response to how hard it was to get that information herself four years ago.