Top duo leaves Savills to start their own firm

            Shane and Cheri O’Neil, who jointly led the Savills plc commercial real estate brokerage office in Tampa for more than 16 years, have left the tenant representation specialist to start their own company.

            In addition to representing tenants in all facets of their space needs, the newly formed ONeil Commercial Advisors (OCA) intends to provide listing, property and project management, investment and other services for landlords and investors from its quarters in the Morgan Stanley Tower in downtown St. Petersburg.

            “It seems to us that there’s a real void of local and even regional commercial real estate brokerages and service providers in the Tampa Bay area, and we plan to fill that,” says Cheri O’Neil, who opened the Studley Inc. – now Savills – office in Tampa in 2004 and had been a senior vice president with that firm.

            “Our vision is to reintroduce the personal service of a local or regional firm,” says Shane O’Neil.

            The O’Neils each have more than three decades of experience in the Tampa area commercial real estate business, representing clients such as Stonegate Mortgage, Feld Entertainment, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, TECO, law firm de la Parte & Gilbert and others.

            Four years ago, Cheri O’Neil represented Centauri Insurance in its site selection and development of a new 30,000-square-foot headquarters in Lakewood Ranch. The property and casualty insurer’s $9 million project was the largest new office deal in the Sarasota-Manatee submarket for all of 2016. 

            “We plan to focus on the bricks-and-mortar of the commercial real estate business, not the process that often can hinder a larger corporation,” Cheri O’Neil says. “We can and will be more reactive to the needs of our clients. For instance, we now have the resources to handle the landlord side of the business and property management in house. We no longer have to say no to that when asked."

            The O’Neils, whose son, Ryan, also is interning at OCA, hope to have five additional brokers on board at the firm by mid-2021.