In this episode of Broker’s Angle, Hal Coopersmith sits down with Gabe Marans, Vice Chairman at Savills and the #2 ranked CRE voice on social media. Gabe shares how he went from cold calls at 6 AM to building a 10,000-contact database, and how LinkedIn video and zagging when others zig helped scale his business.

Transcript

Hal Coopersmith: Welcome to Brokers Angle. I’m Hal Coopersmith. In this episode, we are speaking to Gabe Marans, Vice Chairman of Savills. Welcome Gabe.

Gabe Marans: Thank you, Hal. It’s great to be here.

Hal Coopersmith: So people know you, and we were talking about this ahead of time. People know you and they know you from social media, and you are the number two CRE ranked social media poster. How did you get into social media as a broker?

Gabe Marans: First of all, it’s a badge of honor, that I am number two, I think anybody who’s a casual fan of racing knows it’s easier to be drafting off of the lead car. So very happy that I’m even in that, in that top ranking.

The story to really understand the beginning of it started seven, eight years ago. So this was a pre COVID, concept where I was a mid-level broker, at the time at Savills. It’s, I interned at the company. I’ve been there for almost 20 years. Never left, never tested anything else out. And I realized that there were very few people out there in the real estate and broker ecosystem that were experimenting with social media, specifically LinkedIn. LinkedIn had just rolled out a new publishing feature, their articles function, and they had just started to really prioritize the LinkedIn feed, the newsfeed, for content. And so I started to post some thoughts and I realized that I was getting some traction, and I was casually engaged with it, you know, casually being once or twice a week. And I did that from about 2016, 2017. And around 2018 I started to play around with a video series 60 Seconds with Gabe, because I realized that LinkedIn was starting to push in their algorithm video content. And so I said, let me give this a shot. And I was astounded by the views and the reception that those early videos were getting. It was not all me, it was LinkedIn’s algorithm, literally. prioritizing video over everything else, but I was getting some of those early videos, 40, 50,000 views per video. And so I decided to stick with the 60 Second series and then around that video series have different, thought pieces around what I was seeing in the market, experiences with clients, observations on trends and the like. Then of course, March of 2020 came around and the fog of COVID settled on all of us.

I remember, it was within the first week or so sitting at home with my wife and, at the time, very little. One kid, now we’re up to three kids. And I’m just sitting there with my wife and kind of stressing over the fact that my whole industry was facing an existential crisis. Everybody was effectively two weeks in working from home. I earn a living by helping advice companies on leasing office space. I was functioning and working from home, although I missed my, my team. And while I believed in my heart that the office was centric to functioning as a white-collar employee, I still had the doubt that many others had about this being an existential threat. And so, with her encouragement, I doubled down on social media and I saw this as an opportunity to help, guide those who were uncertain out there because nobody had any answers. And I look at COVID and looked at COVID at the time, as a great equalizer because the folks who had four, five, six decades of experience over my poultry, one and a half decades of experience, they had no better sense of how to guide their clients through this once in a lifetime experience. And so it was as if the race was frozen. And I had the opportunity to maybe slowly weave my way closer to the front of the line. And so I looked at social media that way, doubled down on my content that I was pushing out. And I think with now five years of hindsight, I think it was a very effective strategy. It was a very, good decision and our business benefited from some of the decisions that we made in those early days.

Hal Coopersmith: So you said it was a good decision to focus on social media and you’ve seen some of the benefits. How has social media translated into some of the benefits?

Gabe Marans: You know, the usual question is, are you getting random cold calls from clients that are asking you to represent them on their real estate. And I used to say it’s never happened. The truth is it has happened once or twice over the last several years, so it’s very rare that it happens. But it does happen from time to time. Most of the direct business from social media comes from one of a few different veins. The first is what I’ll call repeat business. So it’ll be the head of real estate, for a client who we did the last transaction 5, 6, 7 years ago. Who we are friendly with, but we’re not meeting for dinner every two months. And so, when they’re dissatisfied with their current role and they start job interviewing, they may or may not have thought about us before the social media strategy, but now that we’re in their newsfeed, they’re on LinkedIn looking for their new opportunity, and we are just there and present, many of these people will reach out during their interview process, asking us for our thoughts and for help as they’re evaluating the market. And then of course when they land at a new role, we are top of mind for them. So just in terms of staying in touch with our relationships.

Another big vein, are our broker, co-broker relationships, both across the Savills network and also outside the Savills’ network. I’m fortunate to work in New York. Everybody wants to do New York deals. Many people have clients who have space in New York. We have received probably the biggest growth in our team’s revenue within this category. We’re talking about 200 to 300% year over year, over the last four years, with this referral co broker portion of our business. And it continues to grow because we care as much about our broker friend clients, as we do about our own organic clients.

And the third category, is that, you know, cold out of the blue type of conversation. Again, it’s happened successfully a couple of times, but those two times that I’m thinking of were material, and significant transactions. And what I found out later on is they were at a dinner party speaking to someone who said, ¨Oh, you’re thinking about real estate. Do you follow Gabe on social media?¨ They then followed me, watched some of my stuff, felt comfortable reaching out to me, only then reached out having done their research, and then that kind of led to a client relationship.

Hal Coopersmith: So can you talk a little bit about that second category and broker relationships, how that’s assisted you?

Gabe Marans: Yeah. you know, we are in the most important real estate city, in the world. You know, North America, the US in particular is the world’s biggest real estate market. New York is the US’ most important real estate market. I think any post COVID world, the importance of New York City as a place of employment has grown across industries. So you have finance, law has always called New York Home, tech in this cycle is increasingly calling New York Home. And then a lot of these subcategories within tech, including AI and crypto, are looking towards New York as a growth market. Of course you have the nonprofits, government, publishing media, and all the other usual players fashion, big one, especially high fashion. And so, you know, when we think about things like that, Savills is a 40 plus thousand-person company. We’ve got employees all over the globe. Someone who has a relationship with a top fashion house out of France who have a requirement here in New York, they have a lot of different options of whom to call, in terms of supporting their client relationship, there’s a pretty good chance that we might be on the receiving end of that call because we have illustrated both our knowledge of the market, the way we approach the business. And there’s also having done this now for so long, a really good chance that I already have a very personal relationship with the potential referring broker.

So all of those things kind of reinforce the sense that we are going to take care of your client, no different than if they were our organic client.

Hal Coopersmith: And in terms of the postings that you do, what gets the best reactions or most reactions that you know, or is content that people are really craving?

Gabe Marans: So 60 Seconds continues to be a winner. I think the format, which for those unfamiliar is, 60 seconds, although it’s usually closer to 75 seconds. It’s three questions, three answers.

Hal Coopersmith: Only you’re counting

Gabe Marans: Only I’m counting. The people are like, do you know that it’s over sixty seconds? I’m like, yes. I’m in on the joke. It’s, I know. But once you’re there, once the clock is ticking down, like you’re not going to step away. Were that compelling. But, you know, those videos, are typically getting anywhere from, you know, 5 to 8,000 views and some of the more successful ones are getting 40, 50,000 views. And we’re up to episode one 30 plus. So we’ve been doing this now for quite a while. We usually publish once every three weeks or so.

The two written types of content that get the most engagement are content where we are talking about mistakes that were made, kind of lessons learned. So something that has gone wrong with the deal, something that a landlord has done that we disapprove of, we never call them out, by name, but we use that as a learning opportunity. And then the second category would be talking about things that are good that my team has done. So, celebrating, supporting, elevating, the people who help make us great. You know, just today, posted about, one of our client coordinators who somehow while working full-time, she graduated with a double major Kuma sum loud. One of the most incredible accomplishments and we had a nice champagne toast for her in the office yesterday, and she hates the spotlight. And because I think she hated the spotlight so much, I took particular perverse pleasure in calling her out in a celebratory fashion on social media today. But it’s those types of content.

Hal Coopersmith: How may views for that one?

Gabe Marans: That one I mean we’re talking about now it being live five hours. Right before I sat down here, I think we were at 11,000 views.

Hal Coopersmith: So it’s a big tool that you’re talking about in terms of social media. We were talking a little bit beforehand, but not a lot of real estate brokers and commercial real estate brokers are using this tool. Why do you think that is?

Gabe Marans: I think fear the unknown. You know, once you get out there and start putting yourself out there, you’re opening yourself up to criticism and you have to develop and then maintain a pretty thick skin and also have a good sense of the no-go zones. I think there’s a tendency to look at social media as a negative force. I think one of the nice things about LinkedIn, is you have that kind of LinkedIn cringe esque component to it where people are supporting each other, it’s not anonymous. You very rarely have nasty fights. You know, the most aggressive people on LinkedIn are the people who are fighting for a more flexible hybrid work from home policy. Like that’s the extent of it. You typically, and LinkedIn algorithm does a good job of avoiding, politically polarizing topics. You typically don’t see negative religion conversations happening. It’s a pretty safe environment. You know, Twitter is a different story. Several of the other platforms are a bit of a different story. But I think people avoid it because it’s unknown and most of the senior people within the commercial real estate business are also senior in age. And so there’s a sense that I’ve reached this level of success without having to risk potential backlash by posting on social media. So therefore I will avoid it.

And that’s also why with some very notable exceptions, most of the active people within commercial real estate across the nation, tend to be on the younger side which I will classify as being, you know, sub 50 or 55 with a heavier concentration of the sub 45-year-old set.

Hal Coopersmith: So in terms of your own career arc and kind of, we talked a lot about social media naturally, because you’re number two, as you talked about in CRA. But in terms of your own career arc and kind of getting to this point of confidence in both your skill and what you were doing, talk about how you got your start in commercial real estate and kind of how you felt confident enough to get out there.

Gabe Marans: So I was on a different track. I’m New York, born and bred. I went to school here in New York. I was in college here in New York. And I was set to graduate in the middle of the GFC, the great financial crisis. And in fact, I had a summer analyst job lined up at a bank called Bear Stearns and I had my whole life planned out ahead of me. I was about to go abroad for a spring semester. I had successfully interviewed early and secured that summer banking role and I was going to have a great time studying abroad in Prague. Come back, work really hard that summer, lock it down, have a carefree senior year of college, and then get back into the banking world. And of course, I am sitting at a bar late at night, in Prague, probably not a hundred percent sober. And I see the news that Bear Stearns was going under, of course they were ultimately bought for like $2 a share by JP Morgan. But my job disappeared overnight and I ended up interning that summer, summer of 2008 instead at Savills, the predecessor to Savills Studly and had an amazing summer. Had never really thought about commercial real estate or even brokerage as a potential career path. I ended the summer. The guys I worked with said, Hey, go get your broker license. Two weeks later, Lehman Brothers collapsed. I could not get a call back from them. I was in despair for months. I ended up actually taking the LSATs, was getting ready to go to law school, had the applications all, drafted and ready to go and I essentially cold called my way back into Savills. They kept trying to push my start date back. I finally, I had enough. I showed up one day. The receptionist recognized me from the previous summer. The IT people recognized me from the previous summer. They set me up with a, with a desk. They set me up with a computer. Two weeks later, my bosses came in. They’re like, what are you doing here? So I basically squatted my way into a job because at that point they weren’t going to tell me to go home and that was, summer of 2009. So, you know, we’re talking about coming up on 16 years. Started as an intern and, now I’m still basically doing the same job, just a little bit from a different lens.

Hal Coopersmith: That’s pretty incredible. It takes a fair amount of guts, I’d say chutzpah, to go into an office where they haven’t announced a start date and just take a seat and sit down.

Gabe Marans: Well, you know, with all due respect to the legal profession, I knew that I would’ve made a horrible lawyer. So my options were either I figure out a way to get this job or I end up going to law school. And, I guess I really wanted the job.

Hal Coopersmith: You really did not want to go to law school.

Gabe Marans: I did not want to go to law school.

Hal Coopersmith: So you set up in the office, talk about your career journey, how you started at a terrible time, you know, in the economic environment. How did you start getting deals in, how did you kind of flourish within your career?

Gabe Marans: Early years, I embraced data and organization, so I bought a license on Salesforce. I was in the office five, four or five o’clock every morning, staying until 9:00 PM. What was I doing early and late when it wasn’t cold call opportunity? I was doing data entry. I was building out a database, a database that fast forward 16 years, my team is still utilizing and improving on. But it was a lot of cold calling. It was 50 to a 100 calls a day and we had it down to a science. I knew when to reach the lawyers because they come in late. I knew when to reach the hedge funders and I knew when to reach everybody else. This was before the age of technology tools where you could pay a subscription and get the direct dial. So there’s a lot of research that went into making every call and then it became a numbers game. And over the years, the number of cold calls that I made started to decrease and the number of warm calls that I made started to increase. And then the number of referrals that were being made started to increase. But it happens very slowly, but there was no substitute for hard work. I wanted it, I was passionate about it. I believed in myself and I showed up every day just looking to improve on the day before.

Hal Coopersmith: So you mentioned you were entering everything into a database. What were you entering? How were you getting this information?

Gabe Marans: So for the young people listening, this is going to sound very old, but there was a point in time in New York where you can walk into almost any building and stack it. So go to every floor note which tenants were on those floors and put together a visualization of that building, which is a stacking plan. Now, fast forward. Almost 20 years and today most of the buildings, especially the Class A buildings have destination dispatch or card key protected floors. So much, much harder to do this, in this day and age. But when I started, it was a bit of a different environment. And so the database was full of tenants, the square footage that those tenants occupied, their lease expirations, contacts and decision makers at those companies and their contact information, emails and phone numbers. It’s that simple. I would put together all of this information, as a first step towards cold calling those tenants. They range from small little law firms all the way to big corporates. And it took me a lot of time, to put it together. I think, last time I checked, I think we’re up to something around 10,000, account entries in our database. Now at this point, I have a team that helps me out with this and benefit of 20 years of data input. But, I probably, individually, put together somewhere in the range of four to 5,000, of those of those accounts over a five year period.

Hal Coopersmith: So you can walk into the floors, you can get the information. How are you getting the contacts and how are you getting the lease expiration date?

Gabe Marans: The lease expiration date required a bit of jigsaw puzzling. Some of it was a little bit more accessible than others. So we tracked as a firm, proprietary information around comps and closed deals. So when a deal closed, we had that information. So if the 10-year lease was signed in 2013, it’s a pretty good chance that that lease is expiring in 2023. So we might not have the specific month or date, but we track that internally. And so I was able to lean on that. In addition, we paired that with publicly reported information, which was less accurate. Sometimes journalists and reporters, I know it’s going to be a surprise to many, but sometimes they get those facts wrong. So we would sometimes read a story about a tenant signing a five-year deal only for us to cold call them and realize that they signed a three-year deal or a seven-year deal, or no deal at all. The third, which is a nice bridge to what I just said, is having conversations with those tenants. So I would call up tenants and in those conversations, they would share with me when their lease expired, at which point we would update that account. And now we had accurate confirmed information about when that tenant lease expired.

Hal Coopersmith: And so you built this database from the beginning of your career. How did you think to do this? What inspired you and what had you continued going?

Gabe Marans: I’ve always been a very organized person and when I started cold calling in this business, I asked around and most of the people were tracking it in Excel spreadsheets. And I realized pretty quickly that there were limitations to those spreadsheets. The number one limitation was as the spreadsheets reach a certain size, they get slow and unresponsive, and they were also not housed in the cloud. And so I had this dream before the cloud was even a real thing that I would be able to access this database as I was, let’s say, walking into a meeting so that I didn’t have to print out all of the material before I went to a building. I could actually access it from the cloud. And I knew that Salesforce was heading in that direction. And so I test drove a couple of different products. Salesforce was the one that I thought was most customizable. And that was the one that I picked to build out the platform.

Hal Coopersmith: So you had this platform and database. You talked about you knew how to reach lawyers later in the day. Hedge fund, when’s the best time to hit them?

Gabe Marans: So I was in the office at a very early hour. I was typically in the office, four or five o’clock in the morning doing data entry.

Hal Coopersmith: Who else was in the office?

Gabe Marans: I would I was turning the lights on. When I got hired, I said that I was going to be first in, last out. And for a long, long, long time, I was first one in and I was the last one out. It was really only I think after I moved to the suburbs, that that ceased to be the case. In terms of last out for a long time, even after I moved to the suburbs, I was first one in, I’m a morning guy, so it wasn’t that hard for me to do. But my cold calling started with European companies probably around six o’clock in the morning. I would start to cold call some of the European companies. Some of the hedge funds that traded, Asia or Europe were in the office at 6:00 AM generally secretaries and gatekeepers would not start showing up for the hedge funds until about 8:00 AM, so I knew we could reach them before 8:00 AM. And so I was typically calling from six to eight o’clock in the morning at about eight o’clock some of the gatekeepers would arrive for most other businesses. The gatekeepers would show up at around nine. So between eight and nine, I would call other businesses and once the gatekeepers showed up, unless I had a direct dial, I typically wouldn’t, I wouldn’t even try. Then I’d fast forward towards the end of the day at about five o’clock. Many of those gatekeepers left. Except for law firms where typically they stick around until 6:00 PM. And so lawyers, I would call pretty heavily, between the hours of 6 and 8:00 PM because they were never in early. They usually rolled in around 9 30, 10 o’clock in the morning after the gatekeepers were already there. So the best time to reach them would be after hours. So my big cold call blocks were, before nine and after five, and then direct dials or follow-ups would happen in the late morning or early afternoon.

Hal Coopersmith: So you were very thoughtful and saw the future in terms of building out a database early in your career. Where do you see the industry going now? As someone who kind of foresaw a little bit of the future, previously.

Gabe Marans: It has never been harder to do what I had done then today. The amount of noise and the ease with which one can reach an executive either by getting their direct dial information from one of these data sources or even what I’m seeing more and more is AI generated reach out that’s essentially automated. There’s so much noise out there that trying to stand out is really challenging, and so there are going to be two main ways that I see the future playing out in a way that will allow brokers to stand out.

So the first and most obvious is going to be understanding and mapping out your relationships. The way you break out through the noise is by being a known entity. I seek to achieve this by being out on social media, by being a little bit more of a known entity, by also understanding my relationship web and asking people, clients, friends, relatives for introductions.

The second is going to be figuring out a way to stand out against the noise. And I’ll give you one example of something that some people understand. There was a period of time, 25, 30 years ago. Where you would not even read your mail. You got so much garbage in the physical mail, you wouldn’t read it. And around that time, any email that you got had a degree of novelty to it, and you would read every email you got. Let’s look at 10 years ago. 10 years ago, if you got a text from someone, it was probably a friend. Today, I would bet that half the texts you got within the last hour were political texts with people trying to hit you up for money. Texts now has become a channel for noise, so reaching someone by paper, by old school mail, a handwritten note, a thoughtful message, that is a way that breaks through the noise. Now, it doesn’t always work, but you have to think counterintuitively against the grain if you’re going to try to stand out.

Hal Coopersmith: So the future is mail.

Gabe Marans: I think the future is, if you’re going to, if everybody else is zigging, you’ve got a zag. And I think right now everybody is zigging away from mail. And so I do think there’s room for the zagging towards mail. Now let’s say you’re dealing with like a pretty cool, fast-growing startup, like they’re not going to appreciate them getting like a piece of mail from a real estate broker to their home address. They’re going to be like, What’s going on here? This is kind of creepy. So don’t do something like that. But if you’re trying to get in touch with a big publishing house or a big law firm, chances are they’re going to open up a FedExed letter if it lands on their desk, and they’re probably going to take the time to read it. And if they just got a cold email in their inbox, they would probably hit delete faster than they would even see it hit their inbox.

Hal Coopersmith: I say the future is mail facetiously because I’m big on mail myself, just in general as a law firm. And I agree that the future is zagging. I think strip mall guy posted something ¨If you want to get someone’s attention, send a FedEx¨, which is something I’ve very much taken to heart. Certainly in the legal industry, a FedEx is noticed. That is how you get attention. But in terms of brokerage or something like that, sending a FedEx, have you had any experience getting someone’s attention?

Gabe Marans: I tried doing that about 10 years ago. I had set up this introductory meeting with this really cool tech company and had an amazing first meeting. We had a very clearly delineated next steps. We followed through with the next steps, and then they went cold on us. And I could not get through to them. And finally I called their CFO, called their CFO, called their CFO. The CFO finally picks up the phone. He’s like, Gabe, I’m sorry I’ve been dodging you. I went to our CEO and I asked him if he could review your next steps. And he said, where are these guys from? And. You know, he told us that we were from Savills and he said there was a guy who used to work at Savills. I know he’s no longer there, but I hated him so much that I swore that I’d never do business with them. And I’m like, that’s really, like, that’s not fair. The guy is no longer here. We’re a different team. Like that shouldn’t be held against us. And. You know, the CFO, there’s nothing he can do about it.

So I decided to write, essentially a handwritten note to the CEO. I wrote it all out, I FedExed it to him, and I waited for like the magical call to come through. Nothing happened. I called the guy, nothing like, there was no effect. Of course. Because the world is karmic and sweet. That CEO later on actually was tossed out by the board. The CEO went over to a different job and he actually hired us to do their work and that same tech company that I was chasing after, during COVID hired my team to help them transition from traditional office space to a flex platform. So, we help them manage their a thousand people across 10 different locations globally now it’s an entirely different management team, but the world is round and that company did end up doing work with Savills.

Hal Coopersmith: That is very neat. So mail, FedEx, that’s one opportunity to zag. Any other opportunities to zag?

Gabe Marans: I think it comes down to just understanding relationships. I think there’s probably an in-person component of it too. Events, hosting events, building community. But all of this requires work and effort. And you know, there are other things that I’m not going to just spill all the secrets on a podcast. But we constantly think about and I challenge my team to constantly think about doing things against the grain, even if it risks upsetting the apple cart.

Hal Coopersmith: So you’re not going to share all your secrets. I certainly respect that. But in terms of young brokers, brokers coming up, things in the industry, what advice do you have for people in terms of getting their start, and maybe some common mistakes that you see?

Gabe Marans: There’s no replacement for hard work. I think it’s a birthright for every generation to look at the next generation and think of them as less hardworking, more entitled. I certainly was on the receiving end of that as I was coming up through the business. But I actually think turning that concept on its head, I think this generation that’s graduating into this world has dealt with more adversity than most generations that are graduating into this world. They’ve dealt with COVID, they’ve dealt with the economic uncertainty, you know, as a millennial, as an elder millennial, we’ve dealt with a lot too. We dealt with 911. We dealt with a great financial crisis. We dealt with COVID, we dealt with unaffordable housing prices. You know, there’s a lot that we’ve dealt with too, but this new generation has as well. And I think we have to acknowledge that. And also it affects and how you manage them. But there’s no replacement for hard work. I think there is a higher than average fear of failure with this group. and I try to strip away that fear. I try to encourage failure. You want to really embrace this culture of failure. Don’t be afraid to try new things. You want to reward the effort, not necessarily the outcome. And it’s, I think, been a key part of some of the cohesion and the success that we’ve had as a broader team. because we do things a little bit differently. Our clients see and sense that we do things a little bit differently and it’s been a differentiator.

Hal Coopersmith: Well that is a wonderful note to end things on. Gabe Marans, thank you for being a part of Broker’s Angle.

Gabe Marans: Yeah, well thank you for having me. It’s great chatting.