Real estate groups adding Orlando offices

Two commercial real estate servicing companies — Eastern Union Funding and World Property Exchange Group Inc. — are launching Orlando offices with about 150 employees planned collectively in three years.

Lender Eastern Union this week opened a call center in south Orlando with about 40 hourly employees in 4,000 square feet of call-center space at 6925 Lake Ellenor Drive. Employees there offer commercial real estate brokerages across the country services including a free listing platform to market their properties. Those relations in the past have led to brokers referring their buyers to Eastern Union for loans, said president Ira Zlotowitz.

The company reported earlier this month that it closed $4 billion in commercial real estate loans in 2017.

In launching the Orlando operation, Eastern Union fielded 900 job applicants and selected employees starting out at $11 an hour with benefits and increases to $13 an hour within two months, executives said. Call centers typically pay less than $10 an hour, Zlotowitz said.

“I’m getting great talent,” he said, adding that about 80 percent of his hires moved to the Orlando area within the last year. Eastern Union’s Joseph Saul will manage the affiliate division in Orlando.

Higher up on the pay scale, World Property Exchange Founder Michael Gerrity recently announced his online real estate investment and trading platforms would add 100 “high-salary” jobs in Orlando during the next three years. With offices in New York City, Miami and Irvine, Calif., the company plans to add the jobs to Orlando’s workforce over three years. Initially, that group will be at 111 N. Orange Ave., in downtown Orlando.

World Property Exchange has announced it will hire computer coders, network engineers, data scientists, cyber security experts, economists and mathematicians to create a digital real estate stock exchange. Gerrity is working on adding a federal-regulation component to the company’s trading platform by the end of next year.

“This is just the latest example of Central Florida’s ability to attract and grow cutting-edge tech businesses to our market,” said University of Central Florida real estate institute Director Rebecca York, an advisory board member for the exchange.