14 minute read
Real Estate Powerhouse
Beyond Commercial Undaunted in Eye of Storm
BY TERRY GODBEY
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Photography by Julie Fletcher
Growing 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 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.
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
Real Estate. Six years later, she dropped residential to focus on commercial real estate and rebranded her business Beyond Commercial. “I could not be happier with how everything I envisioned has come together.”
Calandrino has earned the CCIM designation as a Certified Commercial Investment Member, and she served as president of the Florida CCIM Chapter’s Central District in 2020. The state chapter named the Central District the best in the state in terms of growth under her leadership.
Her business is certified as womanowned by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council and recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a woman-owned small business. “These certifications are important,” she said. “They show our strength, because there is an underwriting process, and it’s also great to inspire other women to follow suit.” She is active on social media and recently was named to the #CREi: LinkedIn Top Influencers in Social Media in Commercial Real Estate list.
Amy Calandrino
Trends in Office Space
The pandemic has hit the commercial real estate industry hard, Calandrino said. The office space sector will continue to struggle in Central Florida, which has a huge workspace inventory, but she expects employees to keep trickling back to the office. “I am finding some rubber-banding back to the office because not everyone is meant to work from home. I know so many people who are just Zoomed out.”
Orlando has more than a million square feet of office space available for lease, which she said is the largest amount since 1999. “I think the values will continue to suffer until more vacant space is absorbed, since pricing is based on supply and demand.”
Another trend, thanks to social distancing, is more square feet of workspace for each employee, which Calandrino described as a reversal of the open-floor plan, collaborative areas and “densification” that had been popular during the last decade. “We’ll also continue to see more offices wanting to be in the suburbs, rather than downtown.”
On the other hand, the warehouse sector is going strong. “There’s been an incredible need for warehouse space because of COVID. A lot of the supply chain has come back to the United States. You can get anything delivered to your door, and people seem to like that. I don’t see it going away.”
Family Time
The Calandrino family has grown, too — little Giovanni now has a baby sister, Giulietta, born April 4. “Her father named her after a really cool Italian car, the Alfa Romeo Giulietta,” Calandrino said. “It was his turn because I named our son after the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano.”
She enjoys cooking, sharing recipes via her Amy’s Apron blog, golfing with her husband, and playing poker, which she admits not having much time for lately. “I’m telling you what, as soon as my husband and I get a chance to go to Las Vegas, we will. I am a little granola, coming from Vermont, and I love the outdoors, but I also like going to concerts and shows.”
As busy as they are, she said they have a no-shop-talk rule at the dinner table. “We have a San Francisco trolley bell in our kitchen, and when dinner is served, we ring the trolley bell. From that moment on, all the talk is about our family and the babies.” b Central Florida is a vibrant community with amazing sectors: agriculture, tourism and hospitality, medical, and innovative technology. It’s like nowhere else.
BY MEAGHAN BRANHAM
Photography by Julie Fletcher Career Coach Counselor, politician, real estate executive and pastor. When John Commercial Real Estate Leader John Crossman Mentors Peers and Next Generation Crossman’s CEO career transition coach gave him his top four matches for the next stage of his career, it wasn’t a hard choice for the former chief executive at Orlando commercial real estate agency Crossman & Co. In fact, he didn’t have to narrow it down at all: “I decided to embrace all of that,” he said with a laugh.
John Crossman
Soon after, he founded two new companies: Crossman Career Builders and CrossMarc Services. He tackles his new roles in stride by mentoring young professionals and college students at Crossman Career Builders and advising established CEOs at CrossMarc. During a time in history marked by turmoil and uncertainty, his skill for having the hard conversations — like those about racial inequality and mental health — has created a model for executives in every sector of business.
New Companies
In 2019, Crossman stepped down from his 14year leadership role at Crossman & Co., which was founded by his brother, Scott, in 1990. Leaving the successful firm that he helped grow into a top-ranked commercial property management organization was a tough decision, but there were more pressing matters at hand for Crossman. Both his wife and his mother had recently fallen ill, and with two teenage daughters at home, he decided his time would be best spent prioritizing the women in his life for as long as they needed him.
“Then, basically, two things happened that changed my course,” Crossman said. “After six months, both my wife and my mother made it clear they didn’t need me around all the time —which is a nice way of saying, ‘You’re hovering.’ That, and I found the end of Netflix.”
He decided to turn his attention from caregiving and watching TV to a new phase of his professional life: career coaching. After a conversation with his executive coach, his two new companies began to take shape.
He founded Crossman Career Builders first, to focus on coaching and mentoring college students and young professionals in the commercial real estate industry — a realm in which he had already gained plenty of experience by speaking at college commencements and programs across the country.
Soon after, as the COVID-19 pandemic left more and more business executives looking for guidance, he launched CrossMarc Services, where established CEOs could come to him for insight. CrossMarc has since been retained by several Fortune 500 companies, as well as owners of large real estate portfolios.
Diversity is not about lowering the bar, it’s about widening the net. When you increase diversity, you have all your best players on the field. — John Crossman
Each of the two companies has expanded and evolved in the past year, now providing coaching and corporate consulting on topics like mental health, racial inequality and suicide awareness.
Shaking Up the Status Quo
At the beginning of his professional journey, Crossman recalls being one of the only 20-somethings in an industry dominated by his older peers. But for the son of a pastor and civil rights leader, the instinct to lead quickly propelled him toward a mentorship role. “I grew up in a household that was big on purpose and community involvement.”
His career would turn out to present plenty of opportunities to continue that trajectory. Early on, he was invited to present at a Florida State University (FSU) program titled “If I Were 25,” which the college says “brings leading voices from across the nation and industry segments to the FSU Real Estate Center’s platform to talk to students about their work, their career path and how they’ve dealt with adversity and experienced success.” The problem? Crossman was only 24 at the time. Rather than lose out on his insights, FSU changed the program’s name to “If I Were 21” — a change that has stuck for more than two decades.
That was far from the last time Crossman would change the status quo in his industry. “I’ve had an interest in social issues pretty much my entire adult life. But now these new companies have allowed me the time and focus to give me a better platform to express my ideas.”
Constructing Healthy Careers
As he traveled the country, fine-tuning his speeches in front of many promising future professionals on college campuses, Crossman whittled down his advice in a guide he called The Top Five Ways to Get Fired and The Top Five Ways to Keep From Being Fired. His words of wisdom have since been turned into the book Career Killers, Career Builders: The Book Every Millennial Needs to Read! and it was upon closer examination of the teachings in the book that he realized something very interesting.
“I wasn’t talking about being late for work or dressing appropriately, I was talking about these things that could end people’s lives,” he said. “This was not long after the Great Recession, during which five people I knew committed suicide. And think of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. Many times, with really successful people, there is a deeper wounding. Sometimes they are even overcompensating for that deeper hurt they may not have dealt with.
“I personally have struggled with clinical depression. It was terrible, and I would not want anybody to go through that, but I’m glad for the
— John Crossman
In February 2020, Crossman Career Builders was the largest fundraiser for the Central Florida Suicide Walk.
empathy it’s given me. The more I lean into understanding all of these things — loss and greatness and talent — I realize it’s all linked. I don’t know how to not address it. It’s part of my story and it’s part of a lot of people’s stories.”
Crossman incorporates these insights into his work with people he mentors. In February 2020, Crossman Career Builders was the largest fundraiser for the Central Florida Suicide Walk.
A Time for Empowerment
This year has also thrown another one of his passions into a harsher light. The pandemic-related challenges of 2020 presented a kind of reboot for everyone, Crossman explained, forcing perspectives to change not just on career decisions, but on issues of a much grander scale. With the death of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police, Crossman found more and more of his peers compelled to turn their focus toward racial inequality and diversity.
For Crossman, the issue has always been deeply rooted and holds the key to a healthier, more equitable world.
“At the end of the Civil War, former slaves were told they could vote, but they had to own land to vote and it was illegal for them to own land,” Crossman said. “Land ownership has been used to hold minorities and women down for so long. Women couldn’t even own real estate in the state of Florida up until the 1970s. It’s all linked.”
What seems hardest for some to grasp, he said, is that it’s not the people in the real estate industry or their intentional actions who perpetuate these practices, “it’s an example of institutional racism. The whole system is set up this way.” He is determined to change that.
For his part, Crossman has made it a point to provide scholarships for students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including the first endowed real estate scholarships at Florida A&M University (FAMU) and Bethune-Cookman University. Other scholarships include the first endowed real estate scholarship at Valencia College for Hispanic students and an endowed real estate scholarship at Florida State University for women and minority students.
Most recently, Crossman partnered with Kelley Bergstrom, chairman of Bergstrom Investment Management, to provide a full scholarship at the University of Florida master’s in real estate program for graduates of FAMU.
“I am currently working to get 10 downtown Orlando law firms to endow scholarships at the FAMU College of Law,” Crossman said, a goal he describes as an uphill climb. “A lot of law schools and real estate CEOs are not recruiting at HBCUs like FAMU and are missing out on this incredible talent. We need to make that effort at a collegiate level, and we still have a long way to go.”
Dismantling these barriers to access has the potential to create a ripple effect that makes the hard work and sacrifice more than worth it. “Diversity is not about lowering the bar, it’s about widening the net,” Crossman said. “When you increase diversity, you have all your best players on the field.”
Crossman also knows real estate is one of the most reliable means of accumulating and expanding personal wealth. “Look at it this way: If we are on a highway full of other experienced drivers, we are all a lot safer on that highway. The more educated a population is, the more people have the means and financial literacy to navigate their world, the better off our whole society will be.” b
