Kevin Harry Huchingson
Having spent his youth on the tennis court, Kevin Huchingson learned the right time to make a play. With initiative and the help of a mentor, he’s now president and CEO of the state’s largest commercial real estate firm.
Silence. Kevin Huchingson, president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas branch of Seattle-based commercial real estate giant Colliers International, is searching for an answer, but so far there is just this silence.
Outside his corner office on the fifth floor of 1 Allied Drive, the sky looks ready to drop a spring shower and the Arkansas River flows along.
Huchingson drums his fingers on a table in his spacious, sparsely decorated office and fidgets a bit. His desk is on the other side of the room, but he does most of his work at a treadmill, where his computer is mounted, and that faces a view of the Little Rock skyline just downriver. On the walls are framed photos of his four daughters.
Still no answer to the question “What are your strengths?”
Huchingson’s are many. He wouldn’t have this office or lead the 100 or so Colliers employees in Little Rock and Rogers if he didn’t possess the skills and knowledge to guide the company through the choppy waters of commercial real estate. He has an impressive list of professional accomplishments that includes being in the top 10 percent of Colliers brokers and the third highest-performing U.S. Colliers broker in 2013.
He’s a co-founder of the Cap Rocq Real Estate Fund LP, a a group of mostly Arkansas-based real estate investors; a past president of the Arkansas chapter of the Society of Industrial & Office Realtors; and a member of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s College of Business Advisory Board. He’s also on the Baptist Health Foundation’s board of trustees.
There’s more.
But there’s also this: Huchingson is the antithesis of the blustery CEO. His voice isn’t much above a whisper. He’s happy to give credit to others but ask him to tout his attributes and he clams up. Silence.
Here’s someone, though, who has plenty to say about Huchingson.
Dickson Flake, 78, is the Flake in Barnes, Quinn, Flake & Anderson, the Little Rock real estate firm founded in 1971 that would eventually become an independent Colliers office in 2004. It was he who hired Huchingson out of graduate school at UALR’s College of Business in 1993.
“It was a combination of aggressiveness and humility,” says Flake when asked what first struck him about Huchingson. “That’s a rare combination. His personality is one of humility, but his responsiveness and business planning is a model for aggressive implementation. I saw so much in him, I made sure he wouldn’t want to leave.”
MATCH POINT
Huchingson grew up in the Colony West area of Little Rock with his younger sister, Kimberly. Dad Harry, a former banker who became a partner in a company called Business Machine Systems, and mom Jeanelle, a homemaker, were tennis buffs, and both Kevin and Kimberly were swinging rackets at a young age.
“When I was probably 6 or 7, my Mom and I would go down to the park where we lived in Colony West and she’d throw balls at me every day,” says Huchingson, a fan of the quiet and intense Swedish legend Bjorn Borg. “I just fell in love with tennis and played a lot.”
It was a family pursuit.
“I played for hours every day, and in the summers we traveled to tournaments,” Huchingson says. “My dad was entrepreneurial. He owned his own company and could set his own hours and he was always there, watching our matches. My parents really sacrificed so that we could play at a competitive level.”
By his sophomore year in high school, the family moved to a house on Foxcroft Road, within walking distance of the Little Rock Racquet Club.
After graduating from Hall High School, Huchingson attended Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport, where he played on the tennis team and pursued a degree in business. Over the summers, he returned home and would travel to places like Batesville and Stuttgart, small towns with no local pro, and give tennis lessons to earn a little spending money. It’s a nascent version of what he would do in real estate — buying commercial properties in secondary markets, fixing them up and leasing or