Kurt Strasmann, the longtime head of Santa Ana-based Grubb & Ellis Co.’s brokerage operations in Orange County, has moved to one of its biggest competitors.
Strasmann last week resigned from Grubb and joined Newport Beach-based Voit Real Estate Services.
He was named the managing director of Voit’s Anaheim Metro office, which is in Orange, and started immediately.
Voit counts eight offices, including three in OC and five in Southern California. The regionally focused company’s immediate plans are to open a brokerage office in the Inland Empire.
Strasmann, who also ran Grubb’s Inland Empire brokerage operations, will be tasked with handling that expansion.
The company’s also eyeing growth elsewhere in the Southwest, which Strasmann will lead, according to Chief Executive Robert Voit.
Voit tapped Strasmann for the job because of his experience hiring brokers and working in the field to bring in business.
“He was a salesman before,he knows what a down real estate market is about,” he said.
Voit’s Anaheim Metro office counts about 25 brokers and has some of the county’s most successful industrial brokers.
There’s some room to add more office brokers to the mix, Strasmann said. He said he isn’t planning to bring any Grubb brokers along with him at this time.
Greg Coxon, president of Grubb’s transaction services in the Western U.S., is taking over Strasmann’s role on an interim basis. He had been working largely out of the company’s headquarters in Santa Ana.
A search for a replacement is under way, Coxon said last week. The company hopes to fill the position quickly, but it is more interested in getting the best available person for the job, he said.
Voit Strategies
The hiring of Strasmann is the latest move by Voit to grow its operations in the down market.
In March, the company joined forces with one of the area’s larger commercial developers, Costa Mesa-based BKM Development LLC. BKM’s president, Brian Malliet, became a partner at Voit and was put in charge of the company’s revamped asset services operations.
In July, it brought in John Strockis, a former CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. investment executive, to head up Voit’s banking and institutional asset services. It also hired Jeff Doan, formerly with Aliso Viejo-based Shea Properties Inc., to run a new management information system for the company.
The company also just promoted John Pierce, Voit’s longtime Irvine brokerage division head, to president.
“Real estate companies have three paths they can take. They can give up and close or sell their company, they can keep doing the same thing they’ve been doing and hope for the best or they can change to meet today’s needs,” Chief Executive Voit said. “We’ve chosen to adapt and grow.”
Strasmann, one of the area’s better-known commercial real estate executives, had been with Grubb for more than 20 years, starting out as an industrial broker. He took over the managing director role for the company’s OC operations about seven years ago.
“Grubb is a great place, with great people and a great platform. But there’s room for different platforms,” Strasmann said.
Voit’s looking to grab market share in the down real estate market, which will serve the brokerage well when the market rebounds, according to Strasmann.
Voit is largely debt-free, unlike a number of other brokerages,including Grubb,which should help with its expansion, Strasmann said.
Grubb, which has brokerage offices in Newport Beach and in Anaheim, has long been OC’s second-largest commercial brokerage, behind CB Richard Ellis.
Voit’s OC operations have been the area’s third-largest brokerage in the past few years.
Grubb’s two offices worked on $1.4 billion worth of sales and lease transactions last year, down from close to $2.5 billion at the peak of the market, according to the Business Journal’s most recent list, released in April.
Voit’s two brokerage offices in OC in turn did about $1.2 billion worth of business last year, down from about $2.4 billion at the market’s peak.
