Commercial Real Estate Profile: Chase Pattillo managing partner, CBRE, Tampa

Chase Pattillo traveled an unorthodox path on his way to becoming the managing partner of CBRE's Tampa office.

Prior to joining the nation's largest commercial real estate brokerage and services firm, for instance, Pattillo wasn't a broker. Instead, he ran a property workouts and dispositions division for a Jacksonville-based lender with more than $21 billion in assets. He also worked for development companies that invested in multifamily projects and student housing.

That breadth of experience has come in handy in the past year as Pattillo, 47, has worked to bring CBRE's nationwide presence and vast resources - from brokerage to financing to asset management -- to bear for Gulf Coast and nationwide clients and the firm's agents alike.

The results are promising, even for an up market. In 2014, CBRE's 30 Tampa agents and 70 other staff completed $943 million worth of sales of office, industrial and multifamily assets and executed 350 leases.

The firm also participated in $750 million in loans; managed 11.6 million square feet of commercial space; and conducted 2,300 appraisals.

This year is on pace to eclipse those figures.

“Chase has real estate experience in a lot of different roles,” says Bill Moss, senior managing director of CBRE's Orlando operation. “He has good team-building and leadership skills and has proven he's able to lead a multidisciplinary operation, which CBRE is. We needed someone in Tampa who could coordinate and integrate, and be sort of a conductor of the symphony, and Chase has done that.”

Pattillo grew up in Tampa before graduating from Florida State University and joining the Orlando office of Holliday, Fenoglio & Fowler, a nationwide real estate finance firm.
From there, he worked for Integroup Realty Trust in Jacksonville, focusing on student housing deals, and later Flagler Development Co., where he sold or redeployed former railroad assets and worked on an 800-acre office and industrial park in Lakeland.

In 2005, Pattillo joined Corinthian Real Estate Capital and focused on multifamily land acquisitions and sales.

“It gave me on-the-job training on how to get deals done, ” Pattillo says.

After three years, Pattillo recognized that land deals were headed for a correction. When Jacksonville-based EverBank asked him to oversee its “real estate owned” portfolio, Pattillo found himself managing and stabilizing distressed commercial real estate assets from Tampa to Seattle during the longest economic recession in seven decades.

Adding to the pressure of dealing with a $100 million portfolio of foreclosed properties, EverBank was going public. Pattillo's team referred to themselves as “Scapegoat Realty.”
“The bank had no expertise in managing distressed real estate, so really what I was doing was running a real estate company,” he says. “It was a fascinating, depressing time.”

Pattillo stayed with EverBank for six years, until the bank's seized properties were eventually stabilized and sold off.

A fellow EverBank executive who had joined CBRE introduced Pattillo to the company, which he joined in June 2014.

“My role here is to create a positive environment and grow the platform through strategic recruiting of new agents,” Pattillo says.”

He expects, too, that tenant representation, e-commerce distribution, non-traditional retail development and multimarket transactions by companies will impact the Tampa market as never before in the years to come.

Pattillo also believes facilitating debt and equity and adaptive re-use projects will increasingly be focused on by more collaborative real estate professionals.

“There are so many exciting things happening in this business if you can stay ahead of the curve,” Pattillo says.

Moving up
Lauren Coup
Cushman & Wakefield
Cushman & Wakefield hired Lauren Coup as a director in the firm's Tampa agency leasing team. Coup comes to Cushman & Wakefield from Avison Young, where she served as a vice president and office-leasing specialist handling a 1 million-square-foot portfolio. She also previously spent five years as associate director at Lane Witherspoon & Carswell, which was acquired by Avison Young in late 2013. Coup was a 2013 CoStar Power Broker.

Steve Toner
Coldwell Banker Commercial Saunders
Steve Toner joined the Lakeland-based land brokerage Coldwell Banker Commercial Saunders Real Estate as a licensed real estate associate broker. Toner is a senior level commercial real estate broker and marketing strategies consultant. He specializes in development, ranch and investment land.

Prior to working with Coldwell Banker Commercial Saunders Real Estate, Toner had his own brokerage, Coastal Strategies & Investments. He also served as vice president of international for the National Real Estate Franchise Corp.