Daniel Taylor recently joined Colliers International as executive managing director and market leader for brokerage in Dallas-Fort Worth.
After a decade at CBRE, most recently as the company's managing director of retail for its South Central Region, Daniel Taylor was announced in December as Colliers International's new executive managing director and market leader for brokerage in Dallas-Fort Worth.
The opportunity to manage and grow an international brand and one of the top brokerages in North Texas was too good to pass up, Taylor told the Business Journal. In his new role, Taylor will oversee a team of 56 licensed brokers and 182 employees within DFW. Colliers' Dallas office was previously run by Steve Everbach, former president of the Central Region.
During an exclusive interview with the Business Journal, Taylor discussed his goals for growing Colliers International in Dallas, what trends he's seeing in the market right now and what his expectations are for corporate relocations to North Texas.
What sold you on this move to Colliers?
If you look at Colliers, a lot of their leadership is former CBRE, which is how I knew some of them. Colliers is one of the big five brokerages, which is what I consider to be CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Newmark and Colliers International. I always thought, 'Why weren’t they a bigger player in Dallas?' I just felt like there was a really high ceiling there to elevate the brand, to bring in new talent, to recruit, and to grow and develop the business. To me, this was a tremendous opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up.
What are your goals for 2021 and how do you intend to grow the company?
The Colliers team that I inherited in December is full of great people. We have a phenomenal industrial group. I've got three Stemmons (Service) Award winners sitting in our industrial group. We've got a tremendous capital markets team. Our office investment sales team, led by Creighton Stark and Chris Boyd, are phenomenal. I think we've had four or five pitches in the last 10 days from building owners asking us, 'What do you think pricing is? Would you come pitch to sell our asset?'
The same is true for multifamily. We've got a phenomenal multifamily team. We're poised for a lot of growth there. We're running some pretty big deals right now on the office tenant rep side and we've got pretty good talent there. I need to build our office agency leasing team, but we've got a phenomenal lead there with Sara Terry. I've been in some pitches with her and she's a unique talent. She's really good at what she does.
My vision for Colliers is to bring in some youth and some energy. I think that's something that's lacking right now. For me, it's about resetting the culture. It's about a culture of high-performing people that get after it. There are people out there that are young and hungry and want to go out and win business. For someone like that, we can give them a really big spotlight and give them lots of running room. You're not going to see me say, 'You can't call on them' or 'You don't have a title that's high enough to go call on that business.' Call them. Get after it. What do you need? How can I help you? I had a phenomenal mentor at CBRE who used to say that our jobs as market leaders was to take chaos out of the business. I think there's already enough chaos in the business as it is.
It's also about hiring the right people. People that inside our four walls act like a family and trust each other and can be collaborative. That's very important to me. I think if you get that culture right, then it will attract the right kind of people.
As someone who was previously a Managing Director of retail, what are your thoughts about that sector right now?
Retail is lagging behind the other food groups because I think it’s seen the most fundamental change of any other asset class. That’s because so much of it has shifted online with e-commerce. That's what's driving a lot of the industrial growth right now.
I think a lot of retailers have also figured out that they can't just do away with brick and mortar. They have to have an online digital strategy, they have to get their distribution supply chain right and they also have to have the physical store presence. The reason for that is because if you go just with the pure online e-commerce strategy, you start to lose margin.
I’ll use my wife as an example. She’ll buy a pair of shoes in the size she thinks she is, then a size below and size above. Three pairs come to our door. After she tries them on, she’ll send two of them back. If you think through the logistics of that, it’s not only expensive to get those shoes to our door quickly, but it's also expensive for the reverse supply chain upstream. When a company gets product back, they have to do quality control, put it back in inventory and get it to a place where they can sell it again. That's just one component of it. Most retailers have figured out that if they can get you in store, you're more likely to buy something else.
There's been a lot of discussion about what the office needs of companies will be post-pandemic. What are your thoughts on this?
There’s no one size fits all strategy for everyone. I think it depends on what business you’re in. For us, our business is based on information and relationships. If I can have people in the office and collaborating with each other, then that's much more advantageous for me than say, everybody at home doing their own thing. Now, there are other businesses that are on the opposite end of the spectrum where people can probably do that successfully. If I had to guess, most companies will probably go to some sort of blend of these two things, but what that looks like has yet to be determined.
What kind of activity are you seeing in the market right now?
I've really felt that in the last three weeks, the light switch has been turned on. I think this is because people wanted to get through the election and wanted to turn the page on 2020. We also now have a perceived horizon as far as the COVID vaccine is concerned. Before there were just a lot of unknowns. Now, we have an idea of when most people will be vaccinated.
Business likes certainty, and when businesses know what’s going to happen, they can start making decisions. If you look at where capital wants to be, Texas is a bright shining star on the national stage. We're in conversations with property owners that are asking, 'Is now the right time for me to put my asset on the market for sale?' We've also got owners that are calling us, everybody from institutions to private family offices, saying, 'Hey, go find me something that fits this in Dallas.'
We're running a number of deals right now where companies are saying, 'We need a smaller office right now on a short-term lease that is already built out or already has furniture in it.' A lot of these companies that are looking at relocating to Dallas have executives that are moving here ahead of everybody else. Clients are asking us to find them an office where they can plant a flag, but next year, they need 100,000-200,000 square feet. Those deals have already started to enter the market. I think we're going to see a lot more of those towards the back half of the year and into early 2022.
As we start to get through COVID, I'm excited to see how quickly people return to the office. I think we're about to see another long bull market for Dallas-Fort Worth commercial real estate. My job is to position our team to take full advantage of that.
View Original Article at Dallas Business Journal
