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As part of our ongoing focus on professions in the industry, this month we’re profiling BOMA members from various aspects of the commercial real estate industry. Each profile is tied to the feature article in the September issue of BOMA Calgary News in Business in Calgary magazine.
Today we catch up with Chris Nasim, Senior Director, Asset Management, GWL Realty Advisors Inc.
How did you get into commercial real estate?
After graduating university, I had two passions, finance and real estate. After a brief stint in financial planning, I switched to residential real estate where I was buying, renovating and flipping houses. I then became engaged with a family friend who ran a local property management firm, seemingly doing the same thing as I but at a much larger level, being commercial office buildings, and with other people’s money. I joined him shortly thereafter…
What do you like most about your job?
I love business. Working with a diverse group of people at an institutional level is exciting, challenging and presents many opportunities to solve problems and add value to some of the highest quality real estate assets in the various markets.
What is a typical day for you?
I wish days were typical. My primary focus is on implementing asset and regional strategies for various clients, which involves splitting my time between negotiating lease transactions, communicating asset performance and future cash flow expectations to clients, calculating values, engaging with others in the marketplace to understand trends and market information, and helping / mentoring others to support them in their day to day activities.
What are your top two challenges?
Finding enough time to think strategically and trying to see the forest through the trees. We often get so busy in our day to day activities that ensuring the proper focus on the key priorities remains critical. Second, ensuring my colleagues and other consultants or teams we rely on to do our job have the right direction and skills to execute; I can only move things forward if the people I rely on are able to do their jobs effectively and timely.
How do you see the future of your segment of the industry? How do you see it evolving?
Asset Management will always have a critical role to play in managing real estate assets for owners and clients. What evolves is the processes and best practices which seemingly continue to get more complex and integrated with other specialty teams as buildings become more technologically advanced, markets become more volatile and complex as investors are more sophisticated and benchmarking investments in a global basis, and regulations and accounting practices put more onus and scrutiny on management and reporting requirements. Sometimes I yearn for the good old simple days when it seemed we could be more effective at our jobs because we could just focus on our tenants, the real estate and our local market.
-Submitted on behalf of the BOMA Communications Committee