Take a look at a list of Dallas-Fort Worth’s top industrial property sales of 2015, and a pattern will emerge: Every single one of the transactions was brokered by Jack Fraker and his team at CBRE.
Fraker’s group closed 39 local deals last year, adding up to nearly 97 million square feet and more than $5 billion in value. The super-broker also is a founding member of CBRE’s national partners team, which did more than $16 billion in transactions around the country.
Fraker also did his part to boost DFW’s appeal as a gateway investment market for foreign capital, bringing in buyers from the Middle East, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, South America, Mexico, and Canada.
He wasn’t always in real estate. He studied accounting at The University of Texas and went to work as an accountant in Alaska for a pipeline company, a gig that took him to Saudi Arabia and later to Scotland. He came back to Dallas in the 1980s and joined a railroad company that owned a lot of real estate and worked on dispositions.
In a meeting one day, he noticed two Cadillacs parked out front. “One belonged to the developer and one belonged to the broker,” Fraker says. “I thought to myself, ‘I need to get on the other side of this desk.’”
And that’s exactly what he did, spending 15 years at Cushman & Wakefield before joining CBRE in 2003. There, he and his team refer to themselves as an aspen forest. “An aspen grove is all one organism, connected by the roots,” Fraker says. “It sounds corny, but we all get along so well and like each other so much.”
FINALISTS
Randy Fleisher, managing director of JLL’s Americas Dallas Capital Markets platform. Since joining JLL in 2013, Fleisher has placed more than $3 billion in debt and equity financings.
Steve Lieberman. The CEO of The Retail Connection has consistently ranked as the region’s top retail broker for more than a decade. Last year was no different; he closed more than 30 deals valued at a quarter-of-a-billion dollars.
Craig Wilson with Cushman & Wakefield, whose success in 2015 was proof that his record-setting 2012, 2013, and 2014 were just the beginning. In the last 30 months, Wilson has represented five Fortune 100 companies in the location of their corporate headquarters.
