How Strategic Growth Creates Scalable Real Estate Businesses

Share via:

Subscribe via:

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Micah Johnson welcomes Tryf Christoforou, co-founder of 3CRE Advisors, to discuss his decade-long journey in the real estate industry. Tryf shares insights into his diverse business units, which include commercial and residential real estate, property management, and capital markets. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the foundational aspects of real estate, such as financing and relationship-building, which have been crucial to his success. Tryf also highlights the strategic growth of his company, adapting to market changes, and the significance of providing value to clients through a comprehensive suite of services.

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Tryf Christoforou (00:00)
And I think just more growth, we’re growing strategically now. You know, it sounds all butterflies and rainbows. There was a lot of downs too. I don’t want to, you know, it’s been a long 10 years and there’s been a lot of battles too, in terms of owning a business and dealing with some personnel, dealing with trying to grow in some other areas, things like that. So, but I think now we’ve, we feel we have a really stable foundation. We can keep, continue growing through personnel, through accounts, through everything.

Micah Johnson (01:58)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Tryf, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate industry for about a decade now. Tryf, welcome in, man. How you doing?

Tryf Christoforou (02:10)
Micah, thanks for having me. Doing great. Doing great on this snowy morning.

Micah Johnson (02:14)
I heard that man. Yeah, yeah, you’re up there in Ohio staying cold and it’s cold in Florida today too. So y’all can have that back. But I’m excited to have you man. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from what I believe is your approach to how you do real estate, your long arc story of it, the mindset behind it. One thing I really appreciated in our pre-call discussion was that the focus that you have and how you’ve built where you got to today. So let’s dive in on that.

For people who may not know you yet, what’s your main focus right now and what markets are you operating in?

Tryf Christoforou (02:47)
Yeah, great. So our main focus, my company’s called and I co-founded it with Mike Constantini. It’s 3CRE Advisors ⁓ and we’ve got five, six business units underneath that umbrella. We specialize in commercial. We specialize in residential. We have asset management or property management, 3CRE. We’ve got 3CRE business brokering and then 3CRE capital markets. ⁓ And I can get into the synopsis of how all those

business unit started, we operate in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. That’s where we’re licensed. So we’re really a Midwest brokerage.

Micah Johnson (03:22)
Excellent, man. So let’s go ahead and back up into that. Take us through that journey. How’d you get started about 10 years ago? And what was that path to leading to have all those under the three CRE brand?

Tryf Christoforou (03:36)
Yeah, so I’ll go back

to 2010 just because that’s kind how I got into the brokerage world. In 2010, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati, bachelor’s in marketing and went into ⁓ becoming a loan officer. Crazy, right? Used my degree perfectly. ⁓ But my best friend owned one of my best friends owned the company and wanted me to join as a sales salesperson. So really, for the next three, four years, I developed the banking side of real estate ⁓ in terms of skills.

how loans work, what they look at, the credit scores, the debt to income ratios, all that, which really helped me propel him from a sales standpoint and understand the backend of real estate. ⁓ And then two, three years later, I was promoted into a management position with them that allowed me to start managing loan officers and pipelines. you could kind of see some offices. learned the financing and then learning how to manage people. It’s critical as you want to grow your own company.

Micah Johnson (04:32)
Right.

Tryf Christoforou (04:34)
I’ve always been entrepreneurial in spirit. ⁓ So I think that’s, that was, that was one thing I always wanted to do. So although I worked for the mortgage bank, ⁓ I always had an entrepreneurial spirit about me, ⁓ even in grade school and everything. And ⁓ my family here owned a few multifamily buildings and sold a 160 plus unit building. And my uncle introduced me to the broker that did that. So I took the meeting and

Micah Johnson (04:58)
Mm.

Tryf Christoforou (05:47)
At the same time, started getting into investments. My father was buying some investment properties. We were doing some flips condos, things like that. ⁓ And just got into real estate. I loved it. I thought it was interesting. It was different. ⁓ Real estate so flexible. There’s so many parts to it. So when I, after I met with the broker, I ended up going to a lunch there and my, who’s now my business partner was at that lunch and we met in 2014. ⁓ And

kind of connected. ⁓ He was ⁓ an experienced multifamily investor, had done brokering. ⁓ It was a little bit older than me. ⁓ he really just took me under his wing when I joined. I made the decision to join the brokerage and the first day I got there, the broker actually put us in the same office. So that was funny. ⁓ now 12 years later, we still have the same office in terms of our company and brand.

Micah Johnson (06:43)
Mr. Bean Man.

Tryf Christoforou (06:44)
Look at looking back, he was he was really a mentor to me and we he was specializing more in retail commercial assets and I came in with the specialty of multifamily. I like multifamily. I like departments. I understood it very much easier to underwrite. ⁓ So ultimately we kind of synced up and he mentored me through how to underwrite, how to look at properties, how to talk to the buyers about those properties, etc. And ultimately we created an informal partnership. We were doing deals together, but it wasn’t a brand. wasn’t a company. Wasn’t anything.

So in 2016, we’ve made the decision to leave the broker and create the brand 3CRE Advisors, which is gonna be 10 years old this year. And we were able to first specialize in commercial. We had taken our past two years, started building that brand up, but it was just us two. No real direction in terms of what we were gonna do. We just wanted to create this partnership and company and see where it got us.

Over time, we really started to take a market presence in Cincinnati, ⁓ Northern Kentucky, ⁓ started doing transactions and people started to notice us. We implemented some social media at the time. Instagram, Facebook was kind of newer, so we were a little bit ahead of the curve there. Mike had a lot of the experience. I had a lot of the salesmanship where I could go out and find the clients and do that part of it. And it was just a good yin and yang relationship. ⁓ Ultimately, we started doing transactions. And in 2018,

⁓ we were representing a national family entertainment center, ⁓ and met Brett post, who’s another, ⁓ director of ours and partner for the three series business brokering. And he was, he was consulting them on their restaurant and how to bring in a restaurant to help with this family entertainment center. Cause the entertainment center did not want to manage their own restaurant. so they were going to sublease it and, bring in a brand and different things like that. So then we got to talking to him and he’s like, I’m a commercial agent, but I.

Micah Johnson (08:32)
Okay.

Tryf Christoforou (08:40)
do business brokering and we’re like, that’s an interesting concept. How does it work? We learned about business brokering. So we buy and sell, help people buy and sell businesses as well. But it typically 95 % of the time involves a real estate deal. Whether you’re doing a lease, whether you’re doing, ⁓ whether you’re doing an acquisition or disposition of an asset, there’s value there. ⁓ So we saw that was nice to be able to offer that service in house, but also we had the real estate skills behind it. So Brett was kind of the

third person to join us in the brokerage. And then in 2019, we created 3CRE Property Management because in 2019, had sold, Mike had identified and sold 100,000 square foot shopping center, which we still manage today. And we had done the disposition on it. And ultimately we’re like, why do we keep referring management services out?

and not keeping this revenue in. So we created some infrastructure. We had to sign that account first. We weren’t gonna do it without any revenues coming in. And that was a big part of our growth. We always wanted to know we had revenues that could come in before we went out and tried a new venture because we’re very conservative in that fact in terms of our growth. that client ended up being our first property management client and he’s still our property management client. We still manage the center for him but.

What we were able to see with that business unit was, we can keep the relationships. We know how to do leasing. We can tweak the engine. We can make sure the investment’s growing. And then when they ultimately decide to sell again, we’ll be the brokers to sell it, because who better knows the asset than us? So we’ve now morphed that business unit into about 600,000, 700,000 square feet of commercial management. We don’t do any multifamily currently, but it’s all office, industrial, retail, and

Micah Johnson (10:19)
Right?

Tryf Christoforou (10:31)
shopping centers, things like that. So we started that process as well.

Then going back to my roots, I had a client that in 2020, I was selling a multi million dollar apartment building for and he came to me and he’s like, man, I wish you could sell homes. I just love working with your brokerage. We had done numerous deals together and I just don’t get that level of service with some of the other agents on the residential side that I’ve worked with before. And I looked at his home and it was like eight, 900,000.

And I’m like, man, that’s like a 20, $25,000 commission that again, we’re giving away, you know, it’s not that I wanted to do residential, but I had that background from the loan perspective, going back to from 2010 to 14. And I, I spoke to Mike and I said, Mike, why can’t we bring agents that help us with residential where we can retain the clients? Cause investors own homes and homeowners want to probably buy investments over, over time. So there was some synergy there and

We created three CRE residential probably during the worst time in the beginning because it was COVID and everything shut down for like five months. But you know, over time it became the hottest market in residential history. Really. I mean, the amount of transactions that were going on were ridiculous and it was nuts. But we’ve now grown that team to about 10, 12 agents as well. So we’ve got 40 agents total between all our business units.

So we’re very horizontal in terms of the services we offer in our brokerage, but we’ve got specialists that are vertically integrated that specialize in either different asset types or the business units themselves. And then last year we had been referring a lot of loans to a broker that I have a great relationship with here. And Mike has a great relationship. We felt really comfortable with him. His name is JR Foster and he’s got his own brokerage company, but we’re like, Hey, can we white label you under

under our capital mark or under our three CRE and create three CRE capital markets. ⁓ Because we saw the opportunity in that sense that ⁓ we’re doing a ton of transactions. And, you know, when we’re doing leases to a lot of these new businesses need SBA financing or, you know, help with their build out or equipment purchases and things like that. Not everybody has, you know, we do some breweries, 1.5 million sitting in the bank, right? So they need to finance that. So we saw an opportunity not only for the

Micah Johnson (13:04)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Tryf Christoforou (13:28)
acquisition of real estate, but also ⁓ leasing and things like that. And we’ve been following the data and you know, on the commercial side of things, a lot of the loans are coming due in the next year or two. People refinance or purchase during 2020, 2021 and the commercial loans are typically three, five, seven year fix and there’s a balloon due after it. So we also wanted to provide a service to our clients where we can refinance them.

But we’re starting that process as well. Now we’ve got a client that owns a ⁓ $4 million center right now, four to 5 million that they want to pull some of their cash out to be able to purchase something else. It’s fully occupied. So we’re helping them do the refi cash out. Now, hopefully we get the purchase with them as well. But the fact that we can even provide that just adds another value add to our clients. So our clients really can come into our shop. That’s morphed over the past 10 years through Mike and I’s vision to grow, but strategically grow.

add pieces that help our brand, our client experience, and they can come here and have some sort of service that they need help from through 3CRE.

Micah Johnson (14:36)
Right, man, and I love what y’all built there. It runs with a concept that I’ve heard where it’s called soft pressing, where the idea is as you get into something, and it exists really throughout your whole career span so far, where it’s not that you’re trying to shove every door open, you’re seeing what comes along next. What, what,

Tryf Christoforou (14:55)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (15:39)
What doesn’t require me to force it? What can I just twist the knob and it just opens naturally? It makes sense for me to do next. And that’s what you’ve managed to do. But beginning in one of my opinions, the best way possible, you started with a career in the industry. You had some background knowledge already from family being in it, but getting to see under the hood of real estate is one of the most important parts of this industry. Understanding how it works. Cause I always, I always told people there’s two games.

You have the rules of real estate where the contracts, the processes, those, and then you got people and those are not played the same way you have to. And you can’t understand the people part until you understand the rules of the game. It’s like football or golf. Like the rules are good. We like them. They make it where we have a game, but we can’t play the game unless we know them, especially really well. And the better you get them, the better you can serve the better it starts to come out. And that really started to leak through as you.

Tryf Christoforou (16:10)
Yep. Now.

Micah Johnson (16:36)
did well in the mortgage and then you learn the management part and then you jump to the brokerage part. But again, another thing there, relationships. It’s how you got introduced. It was these moments where real estate is relationship driven. Your dad introducing you to the broker, right? Those tight, you wouldn’t just take a call or lunch with anybody. It’s those people close to the business that keep introducing you to that next thing. And you said it, real estate’s a big industry, That’s one reason I love about it.

Tryf Christoforou (17:04)
It’s huge

and you make it’s a great point. It’s all relationship driven and keeping up with those relationships and ultimately you’ve got to make sure the client wins through their investments, through their purchases, whatever you’re through the management. If they’re not winning, then you’re going to lose the relationship. At the end of the day though, in this business, it is all about their returns and money and that’s what it comes down to and who can perform. So, you know, we want it to be strategic in terms of the services we provided, but

Micah Johnson (17:13)
Right?

Tryf Christoforou (17:32)
Also, Mike and I couldn’t do that in the beginning just ourselves, right? So you have to bring in these pieces and these people and personnel that can help you grow in all those different ⁓ services that we provide for the different asset types. ⁓ And you’re only as good as your team, right? So making sure that you are bringing quality people that can add value to

Micah Johnson (17:53)
100 % man, because it’s having an expert in the high level seats is what lets you grow it, not making it up, not trying to guess. A lot of folks start things. They think starting is the day they open versus the reality is it’s the first time you started reading. That’s the start date. Accept the education part upfront that is part of your whole journey. And it will lead to like you’re talking about the capital markets part. You met somebody who was an expert at it.

Tryf Christoforou (17:59)
Correct.

Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (18:21)
You were able to build the relationship with them and then bring them under in a white label service. So now you get to offer that. And at the same time, what I really appreciate that you’ve done, you’re doing it in a way where your client keeps trusting you. You’re not bringing random people into their worlds. You’re bringing experts into their worlds because like you said, unless you’re getting the return, none of it matters. That’s where real estate is like any other business. something I, especially for entrepreneurs, real estate is interesting that

Tryf Christoforou (18:37)
Hmm.

Right.

Micah Johnson (18:50)
You don’t have to want to own a business to be successful in real estate, but however, the folks that own things like yourself, you were always going to own something. You always had that spirit that you were going to build something. Real estate became your commodity. That’s what it was. And that’s where business is fun. The fundamentals are across the board. You got to have a great product. If it doesn’t actually solve your, your customer’s problem, then you don’t got one. Right. And in our world.

Tryf Christoforou (19:14)
Exactly.

Micah Johnson (19:15)
Our world is service. Our world is knowledge. Our world is experience actually getting them from point A to point B successfully. Time after time after time, that is the product itself. And that’s what y’all done a great job at. And that’s what leads to those integrations. Like you’re talking about where you’re able to capitalize on, Hey, we’re referring this revenue out. Can we bring this in right now? And I always say this right thing at the wrong time is still the wrong thing, but right thing at the right time.

That’s life-changing. And that was the moment after moment y’all were experiencing. So thanks for sharing that story, man. What’s that led y’all to today? What are you excited about this year?

Tryf Christoforou (19:45)
Absolutely.

And I think just more growth, we’re growing strategically now. You know, it sounds all butterflies and rainbows. There was a lot of downs too. I don’t want to, you know, it’s been a long 10 years and there’s been a lot of battles too, in terms of owning a business and dealing with some personnel, dealing with trying to grow in some other areas, things like that. So, but I think now we’ve, we feel we have a really stable foundation. We can keep, continue growing through personnel, through accounts, through everything.

⁓ I think, and you know,

with the economy the way it is now. ⁓ I was mentioning and I’ve mentioned it before, everyone, I think we’re finally in a stable kind of economy in terms of buyers and sellers know what market they’re in now. And transactions are starting to happen. In the past couple of years, the challenge has been, rates are gonna come down. They’re saying it on the news, our rates keep going up. saying, no one wanted to do anything. Everyone’s kind of just frozen in time. And as time has gone on now, we’re…

We’re starting to see where people are like, well, I want to transact again. I’ve got to do something. I can’t just sit on my hands. I’ve got cash. I’ve got this. I’ve gained equity on this property. So I want to move on to buy something bigger, whatever the case might be. So I think 2026 is going to be a growth year from a transaction standpoint. We really saw that growth into Q3, Q4 of last year. you know, rates have been coming down. So that’s also helping all across the board. But at the same time, I think we’re going to be able to grow on the business.

you know, in terms of personnel and bringing in more quality agents to help us bring in that top line. Like I said, we’re, we’re, ⁓ we’re located in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. We really want to make a bigger push in Columbus. We have an office there in Columbus. We’ve got some agents in Columbus, Ohio, Northern Kentucky is its own market, you know, Covington, Newport, Florence, independent, some of the areas. And it’s just, you just drive across the bridge, but then getting into some of those other cities that are really into the Midwest, you know, maybe you’re Louisville, Lexington, and

and trying to implement a footprint in those markets. But we have to do that strategically. We can’t just jump into it, right? So the business has to come. We have to be able to see that. And then from there, you grow into those sectors.

Micah Johnson (21:54)
Right? Right.

And then I want to nail a point that you said earlier that I love revenue first that that gets tossed out, right? Like entrepreneurs, we have great ideas all the time. We can get super excited and start stuff that nobody wants at all. They don’t care. You just think it’s Where paying attention to what’s somebody actually already going to give me money for what’s already there. What’s revenue first so that it’s fueling itself. It’s not you having to support it a bunch.

Tryf Christoforou (22:15)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Adieu.

Micah Johnson (22:31)
especially in the natural flow of your business. Like each thing that you’re, you’re a property management person. They already agreed to have you do it before you started it. Right? Like it was, it was that part where, okay, we already know we have the customer now let’s go. I, once you’re in this business and understand the parts and how it works, that’s, that’s how you want to lead yourself is okay. Is someone already going to want to pay me for this? And this does this line up with something I want to do in

Tryf Christoforou (22:42)
Correct.

Micah Johnson (23:00)
bring in under the company. Yes and yes. Okay, next step. What do we do? What’s it look like to start it? Who do we need? What’s this actually look like? And step after step and then boom, now it’s coming and it was fueling itself the whole time. I love that man. Way to go there. Like thumbs up. Absolutely, man. Absolutely. It shows that y’all won your professionalism and that’s what I appreciate a lot in real estate. know, folks get

Tryf Christoforou (23:01)
All right. Yeah.

Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah.

Micah Johnson (23:25)
We got a bad rap in the industry is the use car salesman concept for a while, but what sets that, what erases that is people behaving like you’re behaving, actually showing up. That’s what I would always tell people. You don’t want folks to think that don’t act like one actually be a professional study your craft. Right. Not just as a slogan either. Like how do you add value? Went back to earlier, know your stuff.

Tryf Christoforou (23:39)
Exactly. Add the value. ⁓

Micah Johnson (23:50)
That’s how you add value. Your customer doesn’t do this every day. They have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time. Learn it to a point where you can explain it to a fourth grader. That’s value. That’s really getting it in a way where, okay, I understand. Because when you can do that, you understand. When you can explain it that simple, you know what you’re talking about. And what that does for you just as a professional, that’s confidence. You can walk into rooms and walk into appointments.

your closing rates will go up. Your everything starts to trend up because the energy you put out, you’re pro at this and you don’t need people to tell you, you know, because you put the work in.

Tryf Christoforou (24:18)
Absolutely.

Correct, correct. And being humble enough that if you don’t know something, you just learn it and be a student of the business. think that’s a big thing too. So understanding where rates are going, understanding, you you’ve got to, it’s an engine and we talk about that and you know, there’s an investment engine, but also in terms of just being an utmost professional, you’ve got to understand all parts of the engine and everything that goes into it from inspections to understanding buildings to how to underwrite a lease, legality stuff, you know.

Micah Johnson (24:32)
Right.

Tryf Christoforou (24:53)
a big challenge that we had and it’s a small, it was a small clause in most, most commercial leases was a force of majeure, which, which, which was something that no one really paid attention to until a pandemic or a pandemic closed our country. then tenants are like, well, we’re close. We’re not able to open. We don’t want to pay rent. It’s in our, it’s in our lease. So just understanding different terms and, the way the engine works, you’ve got to constantly be evolving. And again, that gets transferred onto the client. If they feel that

you have their utmost interest at hand, then they will continue doing business with you.

Micah Johnson (25:29)
100 % man and real estate is a lifelong, you want to be a lifelong learner. You’re always involved in a cycle. It’s constantly changing. Things are moving up and down. If the moment you become static, now you can’t talk about it anymore, right? There’s parts of real estate I don’t talk about anymore because I’m not involved. I haven’t done it for a few years and I wouldn’t know the first thing to tell you. I have no idea, man. It changes so fast. I haven’t done it. Right? So applying yourself to the part that you’re in, man, it’s super important.

Tryf Christoforou (25:37)
Correct.

That’s right.

It does.

Micah Johnson (25:58)
Well, Tryf, man, I really appreciate your time, your story, perspective today. Thanks for being on here. For folks that are listening that would love to learn more about what you got going on, possibly follow you around, see what you’re doing, what’s the best way to find you?

Tryf Christoforou (26:09)
Yeah, Micah, thanks for having me. I appreciate you giving me your platform to even tell the story. ⁓ We’ve got a really good social media presence. So we’ve got two Instagrams, 3CREadvisors is our commercial and then 3CRE.residential is our ⁓ residential Instagram page. So can see some of the homes and things we list on there. Obviously we’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tryf Christoforou is my LinkedIn profile. And then our websites where you can get all our information is 3CRE.com for all the commercial services we provide and 3CREhomes.com.

for all the residential services we provide.

Micah Johnson (26:41)
Excellent, thanks for sharing that. you’re listening or watching in, check the show notes. We’ll make sure we have all the Tryfs links there for you to follow along with them. Again, man, thanks for being with us. I appreciate you here. I appreciate your story. I think we need more folks out there doing it like you. Professional way, treating people right, helping folks be successful across all your businesses. So again, thank you for everybody listening. If you got value out of today’s episode, please like this episode, share it with somebody else you think would get value out of it.

And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate everybody that’s following along here with us. We got more conversations coming up with operators, just like Tryf, who are out there building a real business in the real estate industry. Thanks for joining. We’ll see you on the next episode.

Awesome.

Tags:

Investor Fuel

How Strategic Growth Creates Scalable Real Estate Businesses

Show Summary

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Tags:

Ready to take your business to the next level? Take the next steps below