DATE: 2013-12-16
A building for NASA with no support beams to house the largest solar sail spacecraft of its kind. An industrial space that can handle 1,600 amps of electricity Hitachi could house and assemble the components of an ion-beam accelerator. A downtown high-rise office with beaming views of San Diego Bay for a transportation consulting firm.
What all three spaces have in common – besides beams of some kind – is the fact they were quickly researched, negotiated and represented for their tenants by Synergy Real Estate Group, Corporate Advisory LLC. San Diego-based Synergy is an international alliance of tenant-rep brokers who specialize in rapid turnaround for their clients.
John Galaxidas”We go beyond the call of duty when we look to identify a property for our clients,” said John Galaxidas, CEO/President. “We don’t just go into the commercial MLS databases and pull properties. We contact every listing broker and property owner we can to identify a suitable property. Our marketing on behalf of our clients often helps us find properties that aren’t even listed.”
“Most brokers won’t go to that extent. They typically just go down their own database. We track every space in the local submarkets daily and make our clients aware of all the possibilities, because many are not marketed publicly.”
While many tenant-rep brokers have an online presence, not all of them use it as effi ciently as Synergy to connect tenants and landlords, Galaxidas said.
Galaxidas is as adept at navigating virtual real estate as he is the real thing. He is from a Sacramento family that specializes in developing farmland into residential housing. He attended the University of the Pacific, U.C. Berkeley and Stanford, graduating as a business major with a focus on finance and real estate.
He next worked for then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s constituent affairs office, summarizing and reviewing pending bills and other legislation, and fielding constituents’ phone calls. Wilson later appointed him assistant deputy director at the Department of General Services, Real Estate Services Division, based in part on his experience with the family business. He served throughout Wilson’s two terms, focusing on converting leases on state-owned properties into private ownership. One example is the former Agnews State Hospital in San Jose, now the Sun Microsystems/Agnews Developmental Center. In 1997, Galaxidas negotiated the sale of 8.25 acres of the approximately 90-acre site to Sun as its national headquarters.
Galaxidas struck out on his own in 2004, founding Synergy in Sacramento from scratch as a tenant-rep broker. His experience quickly paid off, landing clients throughout the state and affiliations with other brokers around the nation. The firm now has California offices with its own staff in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Rancho Cucamonga and Irvine. In 2009, Galaxidas moved the company’s headquarters and his family from Sacramento to San Diego, where Synergy has about 250 of its 1,000-plus clients, who include Dell, DHL, HP, Sony and Cisco Systems.
What sets Synergy apart from other brokers? Galaxidas cites several factors:
“We only work for tenants, never landlords. Because we are 100 percent tenant-focused, we can do what no other tenant representative firm does: inventory the market on a daily basis; contact every property owner/listing broker on your behalf to uncover ‘off -market’ lease opportunities; and when it’s time to negotiate the transaction, we draft and send out proposals on your behalf, leveraging one landlord against the other to secure the best lease terms and rate on the space.
“There are so many more aspects of a lease negotiation other than just the economic terms. That is why having a tenant representative on your side is so valuable. There is no savings to you for not having someone on your side. In fact, not having professional representation will typically cost you money in the long run, whether in economics or in lack of lease options, terms and flexibility that we would have negotiated for you.”
– By Glenn Grant, The Daily Transcript