@David Faulkner
When I started selling back in 1993, my first sales position was with a small Prudential office in South Pasadena that did a lot of property management (mostly apartment buildings). As a result, we would also work on pulling in property management business. Over time, I built up relationships with these building owners and many of them either wanted more investment property, wanted to sell the properties they had and cash out or they wanted to move up to larger properties. As time marched on and CA prices skyrocketed (late 90’s early 00s’), my clients were sitting on tons of equity in their investment properties. At this time many of them wanted to either pull the equity out to invest in more property, or they wanted to sell, do a 1031 exchange and purchase larger projects. Being that CA prices were so high (thus the cash flow on new purchases would be low), I started representing my clients in purchasing properties outside of California where the cash flow was much more attractive. Multifamily sales kind of got me known as the “commercial guy”, and so the commercial / industrial business started coming in. So, to put it in a nutshell, I had every intention of being a residential realtor when I started in this business, but I kind of fell into the multifamily / commercial side.
As far as which side of the business (residential or commercial) I like better, I would have to say commercial. While I like them both, commercial / multifamily sales is all numbers, there really is not much emotion involved like there is in residential real estate sales...either the numbers work or they don’t.
Where in Orange County are you located?