Executive Q&A: Mesha Millsap | CEO, Pearl Real Estate Co.

Mesha Millsap, CEO of the recently created Pearl Real Estate Co., joined Silver Ventures as an accountant in 2007 and later moved into the operations side of the business, managing the team that ran event venues such as Pearl Stable. A native of San Angelo, she comes from a long line of accountants. She is closely involved in her church community and in her two daughters’ youth sports. She and her husband like to compete playing golf together.

Q: Will you be leading Pearl in new directions?

Millsap: We started, during COVID, to really focus more on the pedestrians, but you’re going to see that focus increase. And the way that will show up is that you’ll start to see some interior streets that may be closed.

As a part of that, we’re talking about how do we encourage the biking community to come here? How do we work on transportation and ride share, getting people here so that they don’t necessarily have to bring a car?

Q: You mentioned that you’re looking to add more retail versus restaurants. What kinds of retail?

Millsap:

We recognize that there’s some missings in our retail mix. Men’s is one thing that has shown up. We constantly are trying to figure out how can we do more things for kids. We feel like we could have more services here.

Q: How do you feel about the office market?

Millsap: You know, we actually feel really good about the office market. During COVID, we opened a cowork business (Pearl Cowork).

That’s something that I don’t know a lot of people know about yet. So we have this cowork business that’s been around for just over a year, and it’s full. One thing that we have seen is that some of those small businesses that have started in cowork are now looking for permanent office space.

Q: Do you see more office space being added to Pearl?

Millsap: We will add some more office space. The big thing that I would say is that we have a real appetite for mixed-use. One of the things that we saw during COVID was that part of the strength of what we’ve done is we’ve built in multiple uses, so we weren’t dependent on just office or just retail or just restaurant or just residential.

Q: I’ve seen people complain about how Pearl’s parking isn’t free anymore.

Millsap: I can tell you that the decision to charge for parking was not made lightly. It’s something we wrestled with for many years. What the parking revenue is going to allow us to do is to continue to invest in the spaces that our community can come and enjoy. There’s a lot of things that we do where we don’t charge for anything.

I know there have been complaints. I know that San Antonio is not a community that really likes to pay for parking. And I understand that. I don’t love to pay for parking either. But the reality is, it’s a step that will allow us to continue to provide things in a different way. That’s part of the reason why you’re going to see us start to focus more on how can we get people here by other means.