Today we’d like to introduce you to Bethany Babcock.
Hi Bethany, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
At 18, I landed in the commercial real estate industry by mistake at a staffing company. I had just moved to the United States on my own and I was scheduled to interview at an insurance company. I landed at a family investment office instead.
They decided to interview me all the same and I landed the job as the office assistant. I worked that job while going to college at night and eventually ended up managing much of their San Antonio portfolio of office buildings and shopping centers.
I later moved on to do investment sales at a large publicly traded brokerage firm that was focused on investment sales. After five years at that firm, my mentor and partner at that firm encouraged me to start a business to help our clients with the management and leasing of their investments.
I was a new mom at the time and the idea of having more control over my sporadic schedule seemed like a good idea. I didn’t realize how much less control I would actually have those first few years. However, two more kids later and the business continues to grow.
We are now a team of 20+ managing over 50 commercial properties, leasing over 50 shopping centers, and selling investment properties nationwide. My mentor from the prior firm now helps me run the company.
Foresite tries to give our team the flexibility I wanted as a new parent with flexible schedules and remote work for some positions, and even a kid’s playroom at the office. Our primary driver of growth is through recruiting new team members looking for a more friendly work environment.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The biggest challenge, in the beginning, was seeing the challenges our clients faced, knowing how to fix them, but lacking the resources to be able to address them all.
We knew that proactive prospecting for leasing assignments and high-quality reporting was what our clients wanted and needed but with a small team, we had to be selective in which assignments we could take on.
This is when we started saying, “we grow at the rate of people” and we began a focus on securing talent rather than assignments.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Foresite Commercial Real Estate?
Foresite Commercial Real Estate is a full-service brokerage firm specializing in investment real estate throughout South Texas. We manage, lease, and sell high-quality real estate.
What sets us apart is our team. We are a group of high-energy and ambitious experienced professionals who are joined together by our love of the industry and a passion for delighting our clients.
Another thing that sets us apart is our quest for continuous improvement. It is common practice for us to ask ourselves, what will make this even better next time? We then create a process to do exactly that.
When it comes to our brand, We realize that our industry has a bit of a reputation and it’s not all positive. We want to change that. We want people to think of commercial real estate professionals as kind, fun, and genuine. The best way we can do that is to start with our own competition and serve them in that way. Whether it be hosting a get-together for information exchange, creating an online slack channel for all of us to communicate, or going out of our way to make sure someone gets a lead that came incorrectly to us. We want a reputation built on being nice.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
It is easy to look at things now and think I am really lucky. The reality is that a lot of bad luck was turned around when I just didn’t quit. I have to give credit to God for him giving me the courage to do that. I have been fired, I have been rejected, I lost thousands of dollars during the recession, I have lost more bids than I have won. But at some point, I made a decision that was not the end of the story and kept going.
Yet here I am, a citizen of this amazing country I have called home for almost 20 years, with a good family upbringing and I cannot look around and not be grateful for things that I had no control over.
I once lamented to a friend how unfair it seemed that I was given access to pursue an education in the United States just because of my birth certificate. She said, “you should never feel guilt for the opportunities you get, just the ones you don’t take advantage of”. That stuck with me and I try to make the most of my “luck”.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.foresitecre.com
- Instagram: foresitecre
- Facebook: foresitecre
- Twitter: foresitecre
