San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Ex-news anchor finds second calling in commercial real estate
Williams Realty has long been one of the largest residential real estate firms in the nation. In recent years, founder Gary Keller has sought to grow its commercial arm to equal prominence.
And a big part of Cynthia Lee’s job is figuring out how to make that happen.
As executive leader of strategy and growth for KW Commercial’s national operation,
Lee travels across the country meeting with Keller Williams leaders and working with them on establishing commercial divisions in their markets.
“When he says something, it’s going to happen,” Lee said of Keller. “My main job is to figure out what we need to do to evolve and become the best that we can be.”
Meanwhile, she is managing director of KW Commercial
City View, a local KW Commercial brokerage, helping clients such as Massage Heights, the San Antonio Orthopaedic Group and the chain Crumbl Cookies find retail space in San Antonio and beyond. In 2021, she worked on transactions valued at over $38 million.
The knowledge she gains from her local work helps her achieve success in her national mission, she said.
“I wear a lot of hats,” she said. “Because I’m an agent, I’m in the trenches every day. I know what is needed. I know what’s missing. It was an easy thing for me to step up and say, ‘I can tell you exactly what has to occur.’ We’ve been executing on it, and it’s working wonderfully.”
Lee, who grew up in Seguin and attended Southern Methodist University, worked for 16 years as a television news reporter and anchor, including as lead anchorwoman for KABBTV, before she focused on her real estate career in 2014. For the last five years, she’s specialized almost exclusively in commercial real estate.
She describes the theme of her career as “always be open to the opportunity — and be aware of it.”
“A lot of people walk around like zombies. They’re not paying attention,” she said. “There are signs coming at you all the time of the next steps that you should take. For me, every decision that I make — every decision — is a gut instinct.”
She recently sat with the Express-News to discuss her work for KW Commercial, the COVID-19 pandemic’s affect on commercial real estate and her decision to leave journalism. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Do you prefer commercial real estate to residential?
A:
Yes. Don’t get me wrong. I love residential. I love looking at houses. It’s a lot of fun. But working nights, weekends, you talk about being under a deadline? When a residential client says, “I gotta go see this house,” you gotta go now, just so you don’t lose out on it. It’s crazy. Commercial is not as emotional — banker’s hours. It’s a lot more steady.
Q: Fewer booms and busts?
A:
Mmhmm. The downside is that the deals can take a long time to close. You can easily
work on a deal six months to two years. A guy in my office just worked on a deal for eight years. It’s a good one, though.
Q: Describe your experience in the industry during COVID-19.
A:
I’m a Generation Xer. I’m suspicious of everything, right? I also know that you still can make things happen. You still have to get the job done. When COVID happened, I still went to the office. I told my team, “You can stay home, do whatever you want.” They all came. We were there every day.
I specialize in retail. We had businesses that were panicking, saying, “We’re shut down. How are we gonna make rent?” I said, “Alright, as a team, we’re gonna figure out all this PPP stuff.” What are all of the options for our clients? We’re now there for them. I sat on the phone all day talking to clients from across the country. I would be putting out a weekly newsletter: “Here’s everything that we learned this week.” We helped our clients write the letters to landlords.
Q: Going far beyond just helping a client find space.
A:
They were suffering, right? The good news is, the majority of our clients survived. It was all really market dependent. Obviously, Texas fared a lot better because we opened up quicker.
And it was dependent on
which asset class are you: office, retail, industrial, multifamily. That’s the great thing about commercial real estate: there are multiple asset classes.
While office may have taken a hit, the other asset classes were doing OK. Multifamily and industrial were through the roof during COVID.
Q: How is the market now compared to pre-COVID?
A:
It’s definitely bounced back. I would say office is the only one that’s lagging a little bit. (Employees are) going back to work, right? But companies have downsized. You have to look at it this way: All COVID did was accelerate the inevitable. A lot of these companies were going to downsize, or they needed to. COVID was their excuse to finally get rid of the extra employee.
Q: Did COVID bring about any other changes?
A:
In real estate, especially in retail real estate, we got a really good idea of which brands can survive something like that. Coffee. Have you noticed how many coffee shops have popped up since COVID? Tons. We get calls for coffee shops all the time. Pizza. We call them “bulletproof.” They’ve expanded like wildfire.
The other piece is that that retailers figured out, we don’t need all the space. You’ve seen a lot of the big-box stores shrink down, go partially online, do
smaller pop-ups. Drive-thrus, curbside pickup, texts to get your food brought out to you. It’s rethinking, “What is the consumer comfortable doing? What are their behaviors right now?”
Q: How did you come to specialize in retail?
A:
What I like about retail is putting a piece of the puzzle together, understanding why some businesses make it and some don’t. In a shopping center, why is it that one shopping center on this side of the highway makes it, but the one on the other side doesn’t? That intrigues me. You have to understand data, analytics, the “why,” behaviors of people. There’s so many elements that go into figuring out what makes for a great location. If you do all that homework, that’s going to set you up for success.
Q: What makes for a good site?
A:
It really depends. Because some brands don’t need visibility. If I had to give a general statement, it’s going to be something that’s easily accessible. It can’t be complicated to get into the center. If the only way to get out is a left-hand turn, are you gonna go? No. Or if you get stuck on a frontage road, and then you have to go a mile, two miles, to get turned around? Visibility — just people seeing the sign and going, “Oh, we should stop there.” UnderKeller standing who the customer is. The demographic. Figuring out where are the concentrations of those people.
Q: I would imagine that many of the businesses have their own in-house analytics.
A:
You’d be surprised how few actually have in-house real estate. In franchising — because we represent franchisors, and we manage all the real estate across the country — that’s a camp that’s a little bit more difficult to infiltrate. It’s relationships. We will represent one franchisee who finds us through the local market. We do a good job with them and build a rapport. Then they go tell another franchisee friend. Then they’ll hire us. Then they go tell the brand. It goes up the chain. That’s how we work our way in.
Q: You seem to identify strongly as a Gen Xer. What qualities distinguish your generation?
A:
Generation Xers don’t trust, in general, because we grew up in a time where we saw things collapse — with politics and economics, all of that. That’s why we have that workaholic quality. I rarely do lunch because that, to me, is an hour of work time that I could get in. And we always have a backup plan.
Q: Why did you leave journalism?
A:
I did it for 16 years. But then, as you age and your life changes, you start to think, “Well, I’m not going to be in TV forever. I’m going to age out at some point.” So I thought, being a Generation Xer, I better get a side-hustle going.
Q: That’s just the unpleasant reality? Once you hit a certain age, they won’t put you in front of the camera?
A:
Don’t you know? When women age, they become haggard. When men age, they look distinguished. You don’t see that many older women in TV news. Here and there, right? I just heard that and thought, “I better have a plan B.” Not only from an age perspective, but from a sacrifice perspective — you know, working Christmases and all of that, even though I loved it. But at some point, your priorities shift. So my priority shifted to my daughter, my family.
Q: You don’t sound bitter about it.
A:
No. Journalism is different, right? It’s changed. I experienced it 20 years ago, when it really was an unbiased medium. That was great. But now it’s different. I saw it evolve. Things started to become more about money, sponsorships, politics, things of that nature, that would sway some of the decision-making. I didn’t agree with that. I left at the right time. I don’t have any regrets.
Q: Did you carry over any skills from the industry?
A:
Confidence, for sure. Confidence and humility, in that if you don’t know the answer, you say you don’t know it, and go get the answer. Deadline-oriented. Gotta communicate, gotta hustle. You got to get the get, right? The ungettable get. Those are secret weapons in real estate, because you don’t ever give up.