Gateway Commercial of Clayton is an alliance of local, national

St. Louis Daily Record & St. Louis Countian, Aug 19, 2005 by Erin Suess

St. Louis-based Summit Realty Group and Cushman & Wakefield of Missouri Inc. pooled their talents recently to form a new, full- service commercial real estate company, Gateway Commercial L.L.C. Scheduled to open Sept. 1 in Clayton at Park Place, 100 S. Brentwood Blvd., the independently owned and operated company will offer St. Louisans a full spectrum of commercial real estate services.

Joining Gateway are Cushman & Wakefield brokers Chris Fox, Joe McGauley, Geoff Orf and Dennis DeSantis. John Ross, Phil Hulse, Pat Reilly, Chris Hulse and Peder Hulse from Summit will join the Cushman & Wakefield staff to round out the team. Scott Reese, a 15- year industry veteran, is vice president of development for Summit, and Bill Peick is vice president of construction services. Fox will be managing director of the new company, the position he held at Cushman & Wakefield. He will also remain active in brokerage.

We felt that . . . we needed a little more depth than to just take our current group and go that direction, so we looked out at the landscape and saw who might be a good fit, strategically, for us, and that's where Summit Realty Group's name surfaced, relayed Fox. We approached Summit - probably late spring, April, May type time frame - to see if it would be something they would be interested in doing because they had, through Summit Development Group, been really kind of pushing more the ownership rather than the development side of business.

To that end, Gateway will provide such core services as industrial and office brokerage, tenant and buyer representation, investment services, land acquisition, project and construction management, property management, and market research and reporting. And to get the word out, Cushman & Wakefield's existing marketing and research staff will also be making the transition to Gateway.

We see this as a merger of equals on a personal and professional level, commented Ross in a press release. Gateway will be a high- performance team, combining the best local talent with the premier global real estate services firm.

Summit Development can offer its build-to-suit and design-build expertise to Gateway's clients, while Gateway contributes the brokerage expertise, Ross added.

Summit Development Group, a separate entity, will also offer turnkey development and build-to-suit services, overseeing projects from conception to occupancy. Summit Development, founded in 2000 by Ross and Hulse, owns more than 3 million square feet of office, industrial and retail real estate across metro St. Louis, valued at more than $190 million. Summit Group will continue to focus more on the ownership side of business.

Gateway plans to focus its business on the metropolitan St. Louis statistical area, which includes the counties that make up both Missouri and southeast Illinois. It is licensed in Illinois as brokers and as a firm as well as in Missouri.

The real reason we're so excited about this is because it really keeps that Cushman & Wakefield really national, really global platform but with an independently owned and operated company [that] gives us the flexibility to tailor that service to a local level, noted Fox. We find St. Louis to be a very local market, and that's a good thing. We now can really use this new platform to drive and enhance our local business base, but we still have the resources and the depth of Cushman & Wakefield behind us.

With 17 people on staff, including nine brokers with more than 140 years of combined professional experience, the employees of Gateway are very active in both the professional real estate community and in the overall St. Louis community.

Fox, a member of the commercial real estate community since 1991, holds the Certified Commercial Investment membership, is a real property administrator and is a member of the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors. McGauley is 2006 president-elect of the commercial division of the St. Louis Association of Realtors and 2007 president-elect of the St. Louis SIOR chapter. DeSantis holds the SIOR designation and was the St. Louis SIOR chapter president in 1994, and Orf is a member of the Council of Logistics Management.

We are very active in the community in general. Commercial real estate tends to be a driving force in that, and it's important for us, I think both professionally and personally, to be very involved in the community, averred Fox.

This ear-to-the-ground approach to the St. Louis commercial real estate scene paid off, with the formation of Gateway coming at the perfect time marketwise.

We have certainly seen an increase in activity in the last 12 to 18 months, and I think that's going to continue, Fox opined. As the picture continues to get rosier on a national level, we see that at a local level, and we see some movement that we haven't seen in times past because I think businesses are starting to be able to forecast into the future with some reasonable sense of security.

The last three years or so, it was very difficult to make a 12- month projection, [let alone] a three- to five-year projection that might translate into a real estate requirement, he continued. As businesses are able to do that, we're seeing that translate into some increased real estate activity on the commercial side. I think that's going to do nothing but continue, both on a national and a local level.