Justin Mullen is President and Principal of the Reliable Group, Hyatt Commercial. He has more than 10 years of experience in the commercial real estate industry. Justin supports the sales, leasing, and acquisition strategies of the company’s growing portfolio.
[00:01] – [04:38] How a Former Third Party Brokerage Services Provider Found Success in Merging with Three Other Companies
- Justin left their previous company to create a similar business and then Covid hit in 2020
- They merged with three other companies and bought the company away from the bank at a time when it was ripe for buying
- Both strategic and timing factors played into their success.
[04:39]- [11:31] Systems Can Help Your Business Grow Quickly
- The company has grown into a blend of investor and broker, with good people and good relationships is the key to success.
- Having a best in class internal resources was important when the company was a management company and a brokerage company under one financial combined. Creating these resources internally was not possible when the company was separated into two divisions.
- Systems play a critical role in growth, and implementing good systems is key to speeding up processes and reducing administrative work.
- Having team members who are skilled in operations helps to manage the systems effectively.
[11:32] – [17:29]How One Leader Uses Relationships to Build Business
- Justin discusses how their leadership style differs from others and how they focus on building relationships over implementing a one-size-fits-all system.
- The company has seen success in recent years in developing smaller retail spaces and in pre-leasing retail spaces before the buildings are completed.
- The company is optimistic about the market for neighborhood grocery-anchored retail and smaller retail spaces.
[17:29] – [18:32] Closing Segment
- Reach out to Justin Mullen!
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- Links Below
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Tweetable Quotes:
“Just do everything faster. When you think about a good idea, pick up the phone and act on it. whether it’s an investment opportunity, or a business development opportunity. Procrastination is the enemy.” – Justin Mullen
Connect with Justin Mullen by visiting http://www.hyattcommercial.com
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
[00:00:28] Sam Wilson: Justin Mullen is the president of Hyatt Commercial. He runs a full-service commercial real estate firm based in Maryland. Justin, welcome to the show.
[00:00:37] Justin Mullen: Good morning. How are you doing? Thanks for having me.
[00:00:38] Sam Wilson: I’m great.
Justin, how about you? I’m doing fantastic. Awesome. Justin, there are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show. In 90 seconds or less, can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now, and how did you get it?
[00:00:51] Justin Mullen: Absolutely. Like every good entrepreneur, I started by selling lollipops in elementary school.
No, just an entrepreneur at heart. I got into real estate in January 2008. Commercial real estate, I should say. I was in residence for a few months before that. Some of you might remember, that was a pretty tough time to be in real estate. I was a third-party broker for, 10 years.
Continued to be a third-party broker to this day. And was focused on just servicing office industrial flex clients in central Maryland for a regionally based brokerage company. About five years ago I left that company and moved over to a more boutique brokerage company that had some, property management division and a small portfolio of assets that was owned by the family that originally founded it.
I was brought on to run and. Re-energize the brokerage company at the time. That was roughly 2017. We grew from, give or take, five agents including myself to today. We have 18 of us. About two years ago, I, along with one of my partners, my operating partner on the property management side of the company and one of the, call it founders of H Commercial.
We purchased the company away from a community bank that had owned it. There’s a long history of that, but the community bank was founded by the son of the founder of Hyatt. And so it operated as an entity of the community bank for probably 10-plus years. We purchased it away and merged with three other operating companies to form the reliable group, which is what we run now, which is a full-service firm brokerage, property management, land development, and general contracting services, and we started.
Residential division all of which provides third-party services primarily to. Third-party clients, but we also have a significant portfolio of land holdings and assets through the related entities and operating companies that are
[00:03:10] Sam Wilson: going on there. That’s a, yeah, that’s a lot of moving pieces. Do you feel like this, as you just being in the right place at the right time, or were there some strategic steps you took to get, mean, all the way down to, merging with three other companies?
I mean, You don’t go looking for that. I can’t
[00:03:28] Justin Mullen: imagine. Yeah. A little of both. When I left the previous company that I was with for 10 years doing, strictly just third-party brokerage services, I left specifically for the reason of being able to grow and build a business to a certain degree.
Become a competitor of my previous company. They, in my opinion, a very, a best in class operators. geographically they were targeting a different area kind of than what my specialty was. So when I left there, that’s what I was trying to do was to kind of create a similar style company.
And then Covid hit in 2020 and really the opportunity arose outta that. I had a longstanding relationship. The companies that we’ve ultimately merged with I took them a deal, to sell, which is the office building that I’m sitting in now. And in the process of selling them an office building, We got to talking about what their plans were with their businesses, what my plans were with our businesses, and it took us, nine months or so to kind of get through the transaction.
But the fact that the world had kind of shut down and the brokerage company certainly was, had slowed significantly led to a unique opportunity to buy the company away from the bank. At a time when it was, ripe for buying. So it was a little bit of both. Great timing but also it was something that I went looking for to achieve
[00:04:55] Sam Wilson: that in, in, in that, in the last five years it sounds like, previously you were all, it was strictly brokerage, but you’ve become, it sounds like, a blend of investor and broker at this point.
[00:05:08] Justin Mullen: Yeah. We, as we’ve grown the companies, we service. What I’ll call an informal family office. So a lot of the call it assets that are, they’re not owned by the companies, they’re owned by separate entities, but we service those assets. And so it’s a good foundation for all of the service companies.
And the. The families have come together to form that operate very large companies in construction and construction materials. And so they’ve got significant land holdings in addition to, current assets. So we’ve always got something in the pipeline that we’re either developing or doing a value add to, or, our 18 brokers still primarily serve third-party clients.
How
[00:05:56] Sam Wilson: do you keep it
[00:05:56] Justin Mullen: all straight? good people and good relationships. That’s the critical part is, we’ve, our partners, come together and formed a well-thought-out ownership group. And so each division is set as its own company and owns its financials.
And it requires that everybody is paying attention to, every dollar and cent, and yeah, you have to own your financial statements. There’s no hiding, failures here or there. If it’s if you’ve taken ownership of it you’re, you gotta make the right decisions and we’ve got good people to do that.
So, not, there’s no single one of us that is in charge of everything or has to, keep track of every detail that’s going on.
[00:06:43] Sam Wilson: Yeah, I guess that’s a good point cuz you could very easily have one very productive side of the company covering for maybe one side of the business.
It’s not as doing as well. I love the idea of every And is that maybe what you’d recommend is, I mean, even if somebody is vertically integrated, to treat them all as separate businesses? Yeah, I
[00:07:00] Justin Mullen: think it worked well for us. And again, you. Previously when we were a management company and a brokerage company really under one financial combined, it was hard to tell who was, kind of, which of those companies was succeeding on their own.
Or, as we separated those financials, both our brokerage and. Property management divisions have exploded. I mean, we’ve grown, two and threefold in two years on both of those divisions. And part of it is that you take ownership of it at that point, and we’re compensated based on that.
So to me, it’s, one of the reasons that I enjoyed the brokerage side of the business in running a team is that the team is self-motivated. You can’t be in real estate and not be self-motivated, whether you’re an investor or a broker, And so the same goes for the operators of each of our companies.
There has to
[00:07:54] Sam Wilson: be more things that you guys have put in place besides just, Hey, you run your own financial, your balance sheets on you. Like, what other things have you guys done to motivate and inspire
[00:08:05] Justin Mullen: your team? Yeah, well, two, two things there. I would say that, Having good systems in place and using third-party resources, again, coming from a big, a bigger shop where at the time, again, I, you know I considered them the best-in-class, regional operator.
They had great internal resources. How do you process commissions? How do you process new listings? How do you underwrite, investment opportunities? And everything at the time had been created in-house. And when I moved over and started running my shop, I started to try and create that stuff internally.
Like using Excel models too, to, run something. And what I’ve discovered is, There’s somebody that, that’s all they do and they have built a third party. A lot of times its software as a service. Systems. , we can implement overnight almost, and it doesn’t cost us a ton of money, to create the system.
We just need to have the processes in place. So to me, the single most important thing for growth has been implementing good systems that allow us to take a lot of the administrative work and like shrink the time down to a much more efficient process.
[00:09:22] Sam Wilson: Is that something you are personally gifted in or have you brought on team members that can implement and manage those systems?
Especially I’m thinking about in the early growth stages like it’s just a lot of massaging those, I would imagine, cuz at first, as you said, you built an Excel model and you’re like, okay, this is inefficient or maybe it doesn’t work as well as it.
[00:09:41] Justin Mullen: Yeah. Yeah. So, the answer is most of the time I’m the one kind of investigating and trying to evaluate the quality of a resource, right?
And so initially, in particular, the first two years of kind of creating this, or rebranding this brokerage company, I was having to be, neck deep in a lot of those resources and understand how they should be utilized. Fast forward a couple of years now. I understand them enough to say, Hey, we need to be using this.
But I’ve got an administrative assistant who’s fantastic and she, she takes on that role, most of the time.
[00:10:17] Sam Wilson: Right. No, that’s cool. I mean, to have that skill set, it’s something, commonly it’s not a skill set I possess is the operations side of things.
Like I can get the ball rolling, but then once, once it’s knee deep or neck deep into figuring. You know how this connects to that. It’s that I just get overwhelmed. So having those team members, on board that are the kind of, that kind of nerd out on that stuff, I think is
important.
And especially down to the point where it’s like, now I don’t even know necessarily how the systems work. It’s just I know they work. It’s like, Okay, cool. Then that’s. Again, going back to I think what you talked about earlier, which is building your business on relationships. Can you tell me a little bit about that and why you feel like that’s so important to how you and your firm have developed?
[00:10:58] Justin Mullen: Well, yeah, and it’s interesting cuz You talk about the administrative systems, and how that kind of makes you more efficient. Then I look at the other side of it and the business development side of it is where our time needs to be spent. , from a leadership role, I don’t try and implement any one system, fits all methodologies within the team.
Everybody has their own. Way of building their business. Personally, my business has been built almost entirely based on relationships, so it’s rarely a hard sell. It’s a, build a relationship over time. And it, ultimately leads to, opportunities. And so, like everybody else, I, or like most good salespeople, I should say, I try and refer out, probably 10 times as much business as I ultimately get.
And that, in the long run, allows for, longevity and success, and stability. I’m not doing the 400,000 cold calls in, in 24 months that I’ve heard some of your other guests doing. It’s just not my system, now I’ve got people on the team here. That they do have systems like that.
And it very much was, how many calls do I make? How many meetings do I get, and have a very clear path to success? And my number one agent, I would say was more structured that way than myself. . And he’s succeeded very quickly at a young age. So, everybody has a different way of doing it, but for me and our team as a whole, even our investment opportunities come through relationships where somebody’s got a piece of land.
We’ve got, at any given time, we’re actively developing 10 to 15 different projects and probably looking at another, 15 to 20 from a high level, like should we focus on this? And they all come through relationships.
[00:12:47] Sam Wilson: That’s a lot, That’s a lot of moving pieces. you phrased this to me before we kicked this episode off and you said you are relationship driven versus opportunistic and I think that’s a very as an investor, I think that’s how we were talking about that and I think that’s a very different Take on, Hey, I’m an opportunities investor, you said, No, I’m relationship driven.
Can you speak to that a little bit more?
[00:13:09] Justin Mullen: Yeah, I just, I think a lot of investors, claim to be opportunistic and what that means to me is that they think that there’s an opportunity to get a better deal than the next guy or get a better deal that guy is buying it from. And certainly, we’d like to, get great deals too.
For those deals, you either have to be making again, Thousands of cold calls, to find that one opportunistic deal or you build relationships and people bring those deals to you. And so, yeah, we may not squeeze every single dollar out of a deal, but we ensure that the next time that partner or seller or end user, whichever it may be, that’s asking us to develop something or go in on it with them, it’s coming back to us to ask us to do it again.
And so that’s why I say it’s relationship-based rather than just opportunistic.
[00:14:03] Sam Wilson: I like that. I like that a lot. I’d love to hear your thoughts here. We’ve got about four minutes left and before we sign off, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the broader market, and what you guys are seeing. I know you’ve mentioned development maybe talk to us a little bit about what you guys are developing and where you feel opportunity lies in today’s market.
[00:14:23] Justin Mullen: For us, it’s kind of about creativity. We don’t have a box. There’s no box that we have to fit in. Again, it usually comes to us through a relationship. But we’ve got we’re certainly, We are optimistic about, call it neighborhood grocery-anchored retail.
Even smaller retail, we just finished two 10,000 square foot retail buildings. They kind of shadow a bigger development and we pre-lease those before, before the base buildings were done, which, Three years ago, nobody would’ve thought you’d be pre-leasing, retail.
Right. We’ve got another 20,000-square-foot kind of neighborhood, center that’s in a very rural area and we’re 75% pre-leased on that. We haven’t even, we haven’t even gone vertical on that one yet. We’ve got a grocery-anchored center that we’re in development on that. Once we lock down a grocer, that’s gonna do very well because of the, what I’ll call sister companies, and I didn’t get into it, but we’ve got some sister operating companies that are in heavy industrial.
So we’ve got four or five heavy industrial projects under contract throughout Virginia. Right. That we, really like as a long-term hold. And again, it could be, these are locations that could be industrial, or outdoor storage. They could be, lay down yards. They could be vertical development with buildings on them.
We just know that the industrial world is shrinking while the demand is expanding. And so, controlling the land is. And then, again, I’m not a doomsday office person. There are a lot of people out there right now that are saying Office is dying. And I think in certain locations, office is gonna really struggle.
I think that the big corporate world is gonna be the hardest to get back to the office, but in our kind of tertiary, suburban, urban location like Annapolis, Maryland, like Richmond, like Columbia, Maryland. The office is doing pretty well. People want to work closer to home, and so value add opportunities in the office world is something that we’re, we’re eager to look at as well.
[00:16:29] Sam Wilson: That’s awesome. Justin, you got your hands full. I certainly appreciate it. If you would rewind the last I guess 18 to now, what is that? It’s 15, 16, something like that. Years, not even quite 14 years. Tell me, what are some things if there was one thing you could do differently, what would it be?
[00:16:45] Justin Mullen: Just do everything faster. There are very few things that the longer I thought about it, uh, you know, got more, that I had more opportunity. When you think about a good idea, pick up the phone and act on it. whether it’s an investment opportunity, or a business development opportunity procrastination is the enemy.
I’ve, one of the things I’ve done very well is surrounded myself with people that act that, that act quickly at every level of the company. So to me, that’s the biggest mistake I’ve made over the years is not just picking up the phone and moving as quickly as.
[00:17:19] Sam Wilson: I like that. And I think you answered my second question, which is, what is one thing that you feel like you’ve done well?
And I think you, you may have given the answer, but just in case you have a different answer. Yeah.
[00:17:29] Justin Mullen: Surrounding myself with good people, putting the right people in place, and having, being able to look at the industry and the business from a macro level and kind of how all of the moving pieces work together.
And then having good people that are individually looking at the micro level, dealing with the individual pieces and making sure they. I love
[00:17:47] Sam Wilson: it. I love it. Justin, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. I certainly appreciate it. If our listeners wanna get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
[00:17:56] Justin Mullen: hyattcommercial.com based out of Annapolis, Maryland. You know the reliable group is the parent company. You can look up either one of those online and find us. Awesome.
[00:18:05] Sam Wilson: Justin, thank you again. Certainly appreciate it. Thank you
