Karen Leslie Simon is a licensed real estate agent in Benbrook, Texas. Karen has more than 30 years of brokerage expertise, specializing in leasing and sales in the retail, industrial, and land sectors. Her name is listed in the Marquis Who’s Who of Top Executives. Her passion, accomplishments, and leadership in commercial real estate are recognized in the biographical dictionary of outstanding personalities. She was also named to Top 100 Magazine’s list of the Top 100 People in Real Estate earlier this year.
Karen Leslie Simon was granted the license by TREC (Texas Real Estate Commission). To have a license to serve as a real estate agent, TREC requires all real estate brokers and sales agents to satisfy and maintain certain educational requirements. In all transactions, agents must adhere to the terms of the Texas Real Estate License Act and the Texas Real Estate Commission Rules, as well as interact with the public in a competent and honest way.
The Journey to Become a Real Estate Professional
Karen went to work at a community college named Tarrant County Community College when she got her master’s degree. She taught there for five years before deciding that she wasn’t mobile enough to relocate because she had a spouse and two little children. Karen also no longer wanted to teach at a community college and was unable to get work at a four-year university in her region since she had a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the institutions, and they were searching for diversity. As a result, she chose to enter the corporate sector, and the federal government rewarded individuals for their education and managerial abilities, whether voluntarily or not.
Karen left the community college to work for the Department of Housing and Urban Development as the executive assistant to the Regional Administrator for Region 10, a five-state region, where she was in charge of the department’s government relations and public relations. She got notification that there was an opportunity for people that qualified to sit for a real estate broker’s exam and didn’t hold a salesman’s license, that if they qualified, they could have a one year period of time to pass the exam. Karen’s transcripts were checked, and she only needed nine classroom hours out of 900. “I couldn’t have a salesman’s license because it was a conflict of interest because we were in the real estate industry and couldn’t be obligated to anybody else. However, I believed that having a broker’s licence would be beneficial, ” she explains. Karen took a two-week leave of absence, completed the required nine hours of training, and passed the broker’s test.
Karen was given a job with the Henry S Miller Company six months later. It was Texas’s largest real estate firm and the fifth largest in the United States. Karen was hired to develop an industrial and land division for the Miller Company in their Tarrant County office, where Fort Worth is a major component. She accepted their offer and began a career in real estate after leaving the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They agreed to send her to industrial real estate courses, and she became the first female to lead a commercial section inside their organization. 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. “I needed to attempt to be at my best and better than others,” she says.
Karen attended real estate industrial schools and led Henry S. Miller’s department for six years. Miller sold the company, but at a time when the real estate market was going into a slump and there were a lot of foreclosures all across the country, Grubb and Ellis a national real estate firm paid more for the company than it was worth.
Karen chose to start a real estate group named R.E Group Advisor Inc., a women and minority-owned firm, after working for Henry S. Miller for six years as the head of its industrial section in Tarrant County. The company specialised in leasing, sales, and property management. As a result of the huge foreclosures, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) have become the largest owners of commercial real estate in the United States. “There were various opportunities available for a woman or minority-owned firm to undertake real estate transactions for the government,” Karen explains.
Karen is also a member of the Urban Land Institute, the International Council of Shopping Centers Convention, the Fort Worth Board of Realtors, the Texas Association of Realtors, and Commercial Real Estate Women, among other organizations.
Karen served as executive vice president and managing partner of Bradford Commercial Real Estate Services from early 2003 to 2014. She established the company’s entity board and started the Tarrant County-based headquarters. Karen began working with TIG, another industrial and office business, as president and principal of TIG DFW Metroplex West in March of 2014.
Joining Emerson’s Commercial Real Estate
Karen met the owners of Emersons Commercial Real Estate in 2016 and was asked to help them create a Tarrant County office. They were located in Dallas and started in 2004, and Karen was fascinated since it was the first time at a real estate firm, that ownership was genuinely on the table as a possibility. Karen became a partner in the Emersons’ firm and was in charge of the Emersons’ Tarrant County office, which is situated in Fort Worth.
Because they had the potential to take over a large portfolio of Safeway stores, Matt Price, a CPA, and Richard Webb, a banker, founded Emersons in 2004. Emersons has expanded rapidly; they now own or are linked with an Emersons’ firm in Oklahoma City, as well as offices in Austin and Houston. However, in 2019, they created a business named 1045 with a firm called Priority Properties out of St. Louis to handle all of Kroger’s management real estate worldwide, which totaled around 80 million square feet. Both companies had done business with Kroger, and 1045 was given permission to absorb all of Kroger’s real estate personnel as well as their management. As a result, Emersons saw an opportunity to look at additional business options based on what they had seen.
Karen is the managing partner and President of Emersons Commercial Real Estate’s Tarrant County Division. Her tasks include assisting in the production of business, ensuring that the firm is correctly managed, and attending to the demands of clients and staff. She attempts to manage a good, efficient firm, but she and her staff also have a duty to the people with whom they work.
Exclusive Real Estate Services
Emersons Commercial Real Estate is a skilled group of real estate specialists devoted to giving you all of the advantages of an in-house real estate management operation without the overhead, money, or hassles that come with hiring your own employees. Its expert property management services are available to owners, developers, and 1031—Tenant in Common—investors. Emersons hires individuals with a wide range of real estate experience. The organization knows the wide dynamics of contemporary property acquisition, ownership, and management thanks to its competence in property management, construction management, accounting, banking, and finance. Its services may be customised to the client’s preferences, allowing them to be as hands-on or hands-off as they like. Emersons may develop a management program that matches a client’s business, from full-service management services like property management and construction management to single-solution solutions like accounting and financial processing. It has also grown, currently providing brokerage services for the purchase and sale of a variety of properties.
More Women Inclusion in the Sector
In the previous three decades, the industrial real estate sector has altered dramatically. Women have a stronger presence, but men still hold the majority. Karen, too, has changed with time. Karen specialised in industrial real estate for the first fifteen years of her career. She became interested in office and retail sales, leasing, and development after that.
Karen began her career in a male-dominated profession as the first female industrial, real estate agent in Tarrant County and the first in Dallas County. She attended an industrial real estate school for the first time with 36 other young men. When she returned the second time, there were 33 individuals there; three of them were women, and the crowd continued to expand. Women in this region of the nation predominantly worked in residential real estate, and as their careers progressed, they largely worked in property management. Women were initially more prevalent in office leasing than in land and industrial leasing. She believes that women should be given chances based on their capabilities rather than their gender.
Enjoying “Me” Time
Karen admits that balancing work and family life was much more difficult when she had young children. She had to choose between going to a baseball game and meeting a customer on occasion, and she had to strike a balance between the two. But now that her husband is semi-retired from practising law and works part-time, she finds everything a lot simpler. Karen, on the other hand, sought to strike a balance by emphasising that weekends are primarily for family, with just a few exceptions.
Karen considers going home and playing with her 18-month-old bichon to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of her job. She says, “My husband and I have always been dog lovers, and we have a young puppy, and it’s just fun for me to go home and play with him.” She further adds, “My children are grown and so we are empty nesters. But we have a lot of fun with our little guy.“
Advice as a leader
Karen feels that the fundamental qualities of a leader are humility, understanding, and compassion. She underlines the importance of leaders providing a good example of a strong work ethic.
Karen has served as a mentor and instructor to a number of women and men in the real estate profession. She is recognised for leading by example, and her advice to future aspiring female leaders is to “be prepared,” as you will need to work a little more to get the respect you deserve based on your skill set.
“My leadership philosophy is to try not to ask others to do things that you’re not willing to do yourself.”
Written by Steve Sanchez.
