FEATURE
Real Estate Powerhouse Beyond Commercial Undaunted in Eye of Storm BY TERRY GODBEY
Photography by Julie Fletcher
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rowing up in Central Florida, Amy Calandrino spent every hurricane season following storms and recording their paths on tracking charts. “I was really into the weather, heavy into math and science, and I’m pretty analytical,” she said. “I wanted to become a meteorologist and create better systems for hurricane prediction for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.”
A heady goal, to be sure. And although she veered from that path to work as a paralegal and earn an English degree at Rollins College in Winter Park before becoming a pacesetter in the commercial real estate field, the energetic Calandrino creates her own weather system, one in which the sun always shines. “I’m very, very organized and driven, and I really thrive when a lot of things are going on,” she said. Even the COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived soon after she gave birth to her first child, has not slowed her down. The founding principal and broker at Beyond Commercial in Maitland, Calandrino worked with her team of five to grow the company in 2020, and they have already closed more than 20 deals this year. Her company specializes in office and warehouse space, serving business owners, investors and investment groups, and regional, national and international companies.
Opportunity Ahead
In tough times, Calandrino said, “I might pause for a minute. Then I look
18 MAY/JUNE 2021 | i4Biz.com
at the facts in front of me and pick a course. If I have to change the direction my sailboat’s going in, then I will.” Where others saw turbulence ahead with the pandemic, she saw opportunity. “A lot of commercial real estate agents were talking about how they had nothing going on,” she said. “We had a lot of people on the other side not answering phones, so it was hard for us to conduct the deals we did. People seemed downtrodden and pessimistic.” Her philosophy? “You can’t control what’s going on around you, but you can control what you do. I had the time, so I retooled my team and our processes a bit to make the business stronger, and I worked on the things we could control. And we just pushed as hard as we could.” Calandrino, 36, recalled how her husband, Phil, a business attorney and owner of the Forward Law Firm in Maitland, had made the same kind of business refinements when she worked with him 12 years earlier at the start of the Great Recession. “We retooled our operations, and 2008, 2009 and 2010 ended up being his strongest revenue years because he stepped back and thought to himself, ‘What do my clients need to get through these times?’” She also became a resource for her business clients. She had just returned to work from maternity leave after giving birth to son Giovanni in November 2019, and she felt “ready to go full throttle,” pandemic or not. So she began to study everything related to COVID-19 and its effects on business. “By doing that, I’ve helped a lot of people, some of them on a pro bono basis, get through this
pandemic and economic downturn. I worked with them to come up with different strategies.” She also joined a coaching program for commercial real estate boutique owners while virtually attending Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a top entrepreneurship school where she is earning an entrepreneurship certificate through a grant from Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program.
‘Jeffersonian’ Approach
Calandrino described herself as “very nerdy,” a lover of books and learning. “I like to call it Jeffersonian. I loved visiting Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello, in Virginia and learning how he was into farming, into weather, into writing letters. I thought, ‘We could have been friends.’” Her own life began in a pastoral vein. She was born in the scenic Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont but moved to Winter Garden, Florida, in 1989 when she was 5. After high school, she continued on the meteorology track at Valencia College in Orlando while working in a law office. She became interested in law, then switched gears and went to Rollins College in 2005. She also began to dabble in real estate, earning her license in 2007. She graduated from Rollins in 2008, put off law school because of the recession and turned her attention to learning about real estate. “I decided to build a concierge real estate firm to help business owners with their residential and commercial needs,” she said. In 2010, she founded Silverleaf
