Spotlight On: Greg Eisenman, Regional Managing Director, Franklin Street

Greg Eisenman on client support June 2024 — In an interview with Focus:, Greg Eisenman, regional managing director at Franklin Street, talked about the challenges and opportunities in the Atlanta real estate market, highlighting the firm’s ability to adapt and support its clients amidst market fluctuations. With a focus on client-centric strategies and diverse business lines, Franklin Street navigates the changing landscape while incorporating sustainability practices. Eisenman emphasizes the importance of infrastructure investment, particularly in housing and transportation, to support Atlanta’s growth. 

What are some highlights from the last 12 months? 

Franklin Street is known for its extremely collaborative culture and being a fun place to work.  These traits have never been more apparent to me during my time at Franklin Street than they’ve been over the past year, due to the extraordinarily odd characteristics of the market. There are a lot of different factors impacting day-to-day transactional work and the services we provide, including the well-documented interest rate hikes and costs of labor and construction. From my viewpoint as a broker with a focus on retail tenant representation, construction costs remain at high levels, and with the current interest rate environment, the way both tenants and landlords are approaching capital is very different from a year ago. These are just some of the macroeconomic factors that, when combined, create a challenging environment. Within our Atlanta office, and throughout Franklin Street as a whole, we’ve experienced an increased need to innovate and create additional value for our clients and to help guide them through obstacles that are new to them. 

It is no surprise that the Atlanta market is no different than many other major metropolitan areas across the U.S., whereby the office real estate market is seeing elevated vacancies. Our mindset at Franklin Street is to lean into the difficult times, confront them head-on, and invest in ourselves and our platform during this time. We view times like this as an opportunity for our clients to win big in the long term if they approach the current challenges in the appropriate ways. We believe strongly, that even despite the general office segment struggles, we are actively recruiting within our office division and preparing ourselves to capitalize on the great opportunities we see ahead in that segment, among others.

We have seen a lot of big real estate firms downsizing, whether via layoffs or due to changing office/cultural dynamics that lead brokers to feel like they need to make a move.  We have been fortunate not to experience such departures, and we will continue to work tirelessly to grow and show the market that when times are tough, we can still support our people and invest in them even more, ensuring that we can continue to solve whatever challenges get in our way. 

How would you say you are incorporating sustainability into your services? 

Franklin Street’s core nature is one of sustainability and balance, so we are just continuing to operate the way we know: Our firm has a best-in-class commercial real estate insurance platform, which is a major value add and point of differentiation for a lot of the recruits that we are trying to bring in from a brokerage standpoint and for prospective clients. Our strength in the insurance division adds a unique dynamic to the value proposition we provide to our clients and one that not many of our competitors can match. 

Including insurance, we have seven different business lines. When certain industry sectors are on a downswing, it’s our expectation that others are secure, predictable, and dynamic.  

How do you tailor your strategies to fit the needs of each client? 

Plain and simple: we listen. We are a client-centric organization, and ultimately, our job is to help our clients achieve and exceed their goals. Listening sounds like a simple premise, however, we see competitors and colleagues fail to listen to their clients on a regular basis. We tailor our services to each scenario our clients encounter. Each client will have a different set of goals and will need a different strategy of how they want to reach those goals. 

What are some of the pressing needs for Atlanta when it comes to infrastructure? 

Housing is probably the biggest need, with the need for that to be coupled with continued improvement of transportation and public safety. These needs are all intertwined. According to statistics recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau, Atlanta is now the sixth largest metro area in the country, passing D.C. and Philadelphia, with more than 6.3 million residents. However, when you compare the public transit capabilities of Atlanta, and those cities ahead and behind us in the census statistics, we have a problem. It’s especially glaring when one considers Atlanta’s existing reputation for bad traffic and congestion. Atlanta’s current public transportation infrastructure is inconvenient and does not extend to where people live. Ultimately, Atlanta needs additional investment there to make transportation more useful and alleviate the traffic we have been seeing. Mayor Andre Dickens recently announced additional growth for MARTA, but there are still many questions to be answered on when that growth will occur and how it will be funded.

An area where the state of Georgia has taken an “all-in” approach is its investment in the future of electric vehicles. Logically, if Georgia wants to be a leader in this industry, it must address the lack of charging infrastructure. We live in a city and state that are both very pro-business and pro-growth, however, we still have plenty of obstacles we must overcome to reach our ultimate destinations. 

What impact is the growth of Atlanta having on your business? 

As a humble CRE broker specializing in the representation of retailers, restaurants, and other occupiers of retail space, Atlanta’s growth is a blessing because it leads to more transactional work. As a native Atlantan, I am thankful to live and work in a city that is growing every day. We have great sports including the Braves and Dawgs, and our film industry presence is the largest in the nation. Also take into account our mild climate and great weather, as long as one can handle pollen. We have been able to achieve great growth while being landlocked, which is different from most of the major metro areas, many of which are on a major coastline, lake or river. With all of this in mind, the single most important asset that helps drive Atlanta’s growth is our diversity.  

What are some of the biggest drivers of the commercial real estate market that you are seeing in Atlanta?

Atlanta is such a focus for Franklin Street’s growth and investment because of its size, relative to the other markets we operate in, and the continued growth we’re experiencing. We must ensure the market knows we are a major player and have the full capability and expertise to guide clients and prospective clients along their real estate journeys, regardless of their unique needs. When one looks back at the impact of the pandemic, and the ensuing impact that it has had on the commercial real estate environment, not to mention the incredibly fast acceleration of progress from artificial intelligence, the upheaval and change have been astoundingly rapid. 

On a personal level, many believed the retail segment of our industry was in dire straits as recently as 2019, due to the impact of online shopping, Amazon, and other e-commerce alternatives. However, since the general public’s re-emergence from COVID-19, retail has really been the rockstar, at least aside from industrial. You might say that retail has been an Outkast to industrial’s Taylor Swift. She’s just in her own orbit right now.  While the office market has seen challenges and change unlike any other time in my career to date, our firm takes a similar approach to this segment as we did retail in the late 2010s: that change is needed, we can advise our clients on the best ways to strategize and execute that change, and if done correctly, we think there is a huge opportunity for optimization, and in some cases repurposing, of office space. All of this requires a transactional load, and we are on it. 

What technological innovation have you found that have made the most impact on the industry? 

We are incredibly bullish on AI and how we can utilize it in our day-to-day office environments. We do not see this technology as a replacement for anything we do as service providers, but instead we believe AI will augment our own abilities and allow us to be more efficient in the way we provide information to clients and evaluate ourselves. We are constantly figuring out how we can provide better service and technology is helping us to do that. We are fortunate to have an innovative, capable, and forward-thinking chief information and platform officer, who, along with his team, keeps us at the forefront of market innovations. At the end of the day, we try our best to stay up to speed with what is happening and take advantage of what is out there so we can continue to improve ourselves to yield better results. 

For more information, please visit: 

https://franklinst.com/