Boutique CRE Firm Maintains Indie Credibility

In the commercial real estate sector, consolidation has been the name of the game, with national companies scooping up regional firms to cement operations in the region. It’s not over for the little guy, though. There are still successful independent, locally-based boutique CRE firms out there.

Younger Partners, for instance, has been on a tear. The Dallas-based agency offers a wide range of services, ranging from property management to tenant representation to brokering multifamily housing deals, among others.

Younger and his co-managing partner Kathy Permenter launched the firm back in March 2012. The pair spoke with CandysDirt.com about getting the project off the ground and establishing themselves in D-FW.

Their Respective Roads to D-FW CRE

Permenter and Younger have decades of combined experience in the CRE space. Prior to planting their own flag, they each worked for a number of big firms. Their educations also happened to mirror each other. Both got their bachelor degrees in Texas. They also happened to complete the same MBA program at Southern Methodist University.

Permenter, a Kansas City native, enrolled in the MBA program after working in Arthur Andersen’s tax department in Dallas. She then took a job with Trammell Crow.

“I had an opportunity to go do office, industrial, retail, everything in their Kansas City office, but my heart was here in Dallas. Their opening in Dallas was only in retail, so I went into the retail project leasing for Trammell Crow and did that until my twin boys were born in October ’94,” she said.

Younger cut his teeth traveling around the country for Mobil, working on service stations and related projects.

“About every year I got transferred. [After some time in northern California], I ended up going to Philadelphia and doing a big conversion. Mobil had switched service stations with British Petroleum, this was in ’88. And then I went down to southeastern Florida and started doing real estate site selection for Mobil, but then I wanted to get back to Dallas. I’d been exposed to enough developers and enough real estate that I realized that’s what I wanted to do,” Younger said.

Company Launch: Growing Service After Service

Younger and Permenter both eventually ended up at Grubb & Ellis, one of the biggest CRE services firms in the U.S.

“We built a pretty good office leasing business there. We had about 5-6 million square feet of office building space that we leased and clients who were very loyal to us for several years,” Younger said.

Grubb & Ellis ran into some serious trouble after it was acquired by NNN Realty Advisors through a reverse merger. As Forbes tells it, the merger resulted in an “unaligned investor option with very little alignment — and mounting debt.”

“[Newmark Knight Frank] bought them and put them through bankruptcy, so it created a little bit of a mess,” Younger said. “So at that point, we just decided to go ahead and start our own company.”

Starting off as an office leasing firm, Younger Partners expanded into property management. A few years later, it established a footprint in industrial leasing and then got into brokering land deals and publishing market analyses.

“Most of our competitors — there were probably 10-12 companies similar to ours when we started — have either been bought up by a major company or they’ve expanded dramatically and they’re not really as much of a local entrepreneurial company as we are today,” Younger said.

Looking to get into the landlord game, Younger and Permenter launched Younger Partners Investment (YPI) in 2020. The offshoot has been acquiring retail properties in the North Texas area. As previously reported by CandysDirt.com, YPI scooped up two shopping centers from developer Weber & Company in a portfolio acquisition that won them nearly 300,000 square feet of retail space in McKinney and Longview. The firm also has holdings in Heath, Fort Worth, Prosper, and Midlothian.

Permenter, Younger Bet on Tailor-Made Deliverables

Younger Partners has found considerable success in the nearly 13 years it’s been up and running. A lot of that has to do with the firm’s approach to customizing its bevy of services based on client needs.

“We’re able to focus on our client services at a little higher level than some of the national firms,” Younger said. “Not that they don’t do a great job, because they do, but we just have the ability to tailor our services and use our creativity to market spaces. We kind of look at everything fresh when we’re starting on a project instead of ‘Well, we’ve been doing it this way, this is kind of what’s been successful for us.’ We try not to do that.”

Permenter also pointed to the firm’s multifaceted business model, which is geared less toward specialization and allows for more complementary interactions.

“We’ve got so many different brokerage and property management lines that really collaborate together, much more so than the larger companies where they have to stay in their lane,” she said. “Here we encourage a lot of collaboration with the people who are experts in their field. And so people, even an office leasing person, could run across a land deal and come join in with one of the people on the land team to work on a deal. Ultimately, it’s what’s best for the client, and I feel like we can service our clients better than most other companies out there.”

This article was updated on February 17 at 9:10 a.m. to correct an error regarding where Moody Younger earned his bachelor’s degree.