Lead by Karen Simon Emersons Commercial Real Estate is a sizable, full-service commercial real estate company in and around Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas that specializes in property management, leasing, and sales. She is president and managing partner in the firm for Tarrant County, which manages more than seven million square feet of property in the Dallas region alone and 100 million throughout the nation through its relationship with 1045. It has offices in Oklahoma City, and the Houston and Austin areas. Karen oversees Tarrant County and neighbouring counties in the DFW region. She has more than 30 years of expertise and a career that has seen her execute more than 2,000 deals spanning hundreds of acres and 6 million square feet of property.
Karen is a lease and sales expert in the office, retail, industrial, and land sectors, and she oversees marketing initiatives for three counties. She became the first female industrial realtor in Tarrant and Dallas Counties in 1983 when she headed industrial for the Henry S. Miller Company.
When Karen joined Henry S. Miller in 1983, the biggest real estate business in Texas at the time, her career didn’t start with a bang but rather an explosion. She would become the first female broker to be recognized as the top industrial producer in the Dallas-Fort Worth region until she left six years later. Karen’s zeal and tenacity, unhindered by the fact that she is a rare female in a generally male-dominated field, have led to her success in every position she has had. She established the Tarrant County entity board as managing partner of Bradford Company from 2003 to 2014, opened that facility, and then held the same role at Tig, another industrial and office company. Now, Karen will lead Emersons Commercial Real Estate as it expands with the same zeal, aptitude, and knowledge.
Karen, a lady with many skills, also owns Rings from Things and designs personalized jewelery. She began specializing in serving third-party clients in 2011 and has participated in Neiman Marcus trunk shows.
Early Life and Work Experiences
After earning her master’s degree, Karen started working at Tarrant County Community College. She taught there for five years before realizing she wasn’t mobile enough to move because she had a spouse and two young children. Karen also no longer wanted to teach at a community college and was unable to find employment at a four-year university in her area since they were looking for diversity and she had bachelor’s and master’s degrees from schools there. She thus made the decision to work in business rather than education. And whether or not voluntarily, the federal government compensated people for their managerial skills and education.
Karen left the community college to work as the executive assistant to the regional administrator for Area 10, a five-state region, for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In this role, she was in charge of the department’s inter-government and public relations. She learned that there was a chance for those who met the requirements to take the real estate broker’s test although they did not already possess a salesperson’s license, and that if they did, they would have one year to pass it. Karen only required nine of the 900 required classroom hours when her transcripts were examined. After taking a two-week leave of absence, Karen finished the nine hours of training that were necessary and passed the broker test.
Six months later, Karen received a job offer from the Henry S. Miller Company. It was the fifth-biggest real estate company in the country and the largest in Texas. Karen was hired by the Miller Company to create an industrial and land division in their Tarrant County office, which heavily relied on Fort Worth. She left the Department of Housing and Urban Development and accepted their offer to start a career in real estate. She was the first woman to head up a commercial sector inside their company. She was also the first woman to lead an industrial real estate firm in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. She discovered that clients were more concerned with what you knew and how hard you were willing to work than with your gender.
Karen oversaw the department for Henry S. Miller for six years while attending real estate and industrial schools. Miller sold the business, but Grubb and Ellis, a global real estate firm, overpaid for it at a time when the housing market was in decline and there were many foreclosures across the nation.
Karen decided to launch the R.E Group Advisor Inc., a women’s, and minority-owned real estate company, after serving as the director of Tarrant County’s industrial division for Henry S. Miller for six years. The company was an expert in sales, leasing, and property management. As a result of the massive foreclosures, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) were then the biggest owners of commercial real estate in the country.
In addition, Karen belongs to several other associations, including the Commercial Real Estate Women, the Urban Land Institute, the International Council of Shopping Centers Convention, the Fort Worth Board of Realtors, and the Texas Association of Realtors.
From early 2003 through 2014, Karen held the position of executive vice president and managing partner at Bradford Commercial Real Estate Services. She founded the company’s Tarrant County headquarters and the entity board. In March 2014, Karen started working for TIG, a different industrial and office company, as the president and principle of TIG DFW Metroplex West.
Emerson Commercial Real Estate
Richard Webb, a banker and real estate broker, and Matt Price, an accountant and broker, started Emersons Commercial Real Estate in 2004. These two men were distinctive in their own right. They got the chance to establish the LLC for Emerson’s commercial management. because they had the chance to handle the sale of Safeway stores throughout the nation and represented a family trust. In addition to an office in Oklahoma City, they had some representation in Austin and Houston. They desired a Fort Worth office. Being a native of Fort Worth, Richard was aware that locals there strongly favour doing business with their fellow citizens. It’s kind of a family situation. It is not as globally diverse as Dallas. But one thing is certain: Fort Worth has a certain sense of familial closeness. People were aware of Karen since her husband was the third generation of his family to practice law in Fort Worth, and one of their sons is the fourth. She was selected as a possible partner by Emersons since she had worked in to worth for a long time and the connection was beneficial.
In 2016, Karen met the owners of Emersons Commercial Real Estate, who requested her to assist them in opening an office in Tarrant County. They had started in 2004 and were based in Dallas. Karen was intrigued since it was the first time ownership was actually being discussed at a real estate agency. Karen joined the Emersons’ business as a partner and was in charge of their Fort Worth-based Tarrant County office.
Emersons has swiftly grown; However, in order to manage all of Kroger’s managed real estate globally, which amounted to over 80 million square feet, they established a company called 1045 with a company called Priority Properties out of St. Louis in 2019. Both businesses had dealt with Kroger, and 1045 was given permission to take on all of their management and real estate staff. Emersons saw a chance to consider alternative business opportunities as a consequence of what they had observed.
Emersons Commercial Real Estate is a knowledgeable team of real estate experts committed to providing you with all the benefits of an internal real estate management operation without the costs, hassles, or overhead associated with recruiting your own staff. Owners, developers, and 1031 tenants in common may all take advantage of its professional property management services. Emersons employs people with a variety of real estate backgrounds. Thanks to its expertise in property management, construction management, accounting, banking, and finance, the organization is aware of the complex dynamics of modern real estate purchase, ownership, and management. Its services may be tailored to the needs of the customer, enabling them to take an active or passive role as they see fit. Emersons may create a management program that is tailored to a client’s industry, from full-service management services like construction management and property management to one-solution management services like accounting and financial processing. It has expanded and now offers brokerage services for the buying and selling of a range of properties.
Balancing Life Out of Work
When she had young children, Karen acknowledges that it was harder to strike a balance between work and family life. On occasion, she had to decide between meeting a customer and attending a baseball game, and she had to find a balance between the two. She finds things to be much simpler now that her husband works part-time and is semi-retired from the practice of law. Karen, on the other hand, made a point of stressing that, with very few exceptions, weekends are primarily for family in an effort to achieve a balance. She opines, “As you get older and your children get older, that is not nearly as much of an issue. But I think that in priorities, anyone who is successful would have to tell you that it’s a delicate balance, but your family must come first. And in the real estate business, I think, because of the way we’re structured, that opportunity exists.“
Advice for Young Visionary Women
Karen’s advice to all female visionaries: work hard and try not to feel belittled. She asserts that, even if you are not first treated with the same respect as a male equivalent, things are considerably better now than they were when she first entered the industry. She understood that, as long as a woman knew at least as much as the person next to her in order to win the company, clients were never turned off by employing a woman. She recalls, “The initial reservation was on the part of fellow realtors, particularly in the field of industrial as to whether or not the woman could hold her own.” So, Karen says, work harder and try to learn more about it and don’t be easily offended and you will be successful.
The Joyful Journey in Real Estate
According to Karen, she has greatly liked her time working in the real estate industry and the success she was fortunate enough to have. She believes that when she started Emerson’s, she discovered a place to belong since they allowed her to be an equal partner. Additionally, she believes that every day is different in the real estate industry. She recalls, “Unlike when I was teaching many years ago and I taught the same thing repetitively. I sometimes had a hard time remembering whether I’d said it to this class yesterday or whether or not I had said it today to another class. Everything is unique and different every day in the real estate business, and it is a joy to have that kind of opportunity.
Written by Steve Sanchez.
