There’s a new commercial real estate brokerage in Southwest Florida — the names and faces will be familiar.

Fort Myers-based Grubb & Ellis | 1st Commercial is no more. In its place is the latest Lee & Associates | Naples-Fort Myers.

 

Richard Clarke, one of the local brokerage’s owners, said he and his partners jumped from Grubb & Ellis to Newport Beach, Calif.-based Lee & Associates because its decentralized business model makes more sense for them.

“It’s basically a network of 45 offices,” he said. “There isn’t a large corporate overhead like there is in Grubb & Ellis” or one of the other major national commercial brokerages that have local affiliates.

 

A company like 1st Commercial, with its experienced agents, has relatively little need for the support a centralized national outfit can provide, Clarke said.

 

Lee, by contrast, is “transactional based rather than just trying to serve the parent,” he said. “It’s a collaboration between brokers.”

 

Edward Indvik, CEO of Lee & Associates, said that despite the rough real estate market his company has been able to double its size in the past six years by offering an alternative to the centralized national companies.

 

“There’s a lot of consternation and disruptions that take place in the marketplace,” he said. “We offer the agents, the good ones, to join us on what we think is a very stable platform.”

 

Added to that, Indvik said, is the fact that Lee is broker owned: the principals at the local affiliates “share in the profits that are generated in their offices, so they have an interest in seeing that everything’s run as efficiently as possible.”

 

Having more independence can pay off, said Randy Thibaut, who went out on his own in March 2000 from Grubb & Ellis/VIP-D’Alessandro, the Grubb affiliate at the time.

 

Thibaut was on a team of specialists that Frank D’Alessandro — a major commercial broker who died in a kayaking accident — had assembled at the brokerage.

 

Now Thibaut owns Land Solutions, where he practices his specialty of helping buy and sell major pieces of land and helping the buyers handle development issues.

 

“Some brokers thrive and they’re better at working under some sort of national flag,” he said. “And I find that equally there are firms like mine that thrive with more of an entrepreneurial ability to react to the market very quickly and without the rigors of the corporate world.”

 

The experienced agents at the new Lee & Associates office will do well with some added latitude to do the same, he predicted. “They’ll prosper — they’ll do well.”