We pull back the curtain on the dynamic world of commercial real estate in Southeast Minnesota with our guests, Nick Pompeian and Bucky Beeman. These Rochester natives share their journey from their early days, growing up in entrepreneurial families to forging a successful partnership in Realty Growth Inc., a business founded by Nick's father. You'll hear first-hand accounts of their innovative strategies, their embrace of tech, and how they've harnessed the power of the internet to revolutionize their approach to commercial real estate.
Realty Growth
Real Growth Podcast
Experience Rochester, MN
We pull back the curtain on the dynamic world of commercial real estate in Southeast Minnesota with our guests, Nick Pompeian and Bucky Beeman. These Rochester natives share their journey from their early days, growing up in entrepreneurial families to forging a successful partnership in Realty Growth Inc., a business founded by Nick's father. You'll hear first-hand accounts of their innovative strategies, their embrace of tech, and how they've harnessed the power of the internet to revolutionize their approach to commercial real estate.
Realty Growth
Real Growth Podcast
Experience Rochester, MN
The Growing Destinations podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities, by visiting experiencerochestermncom.
Speaker 2:Now that we're sharing about this world that for many years was really behind the scenes. Commercial real estate was something that you just didn't know how it necessarily worked, or how businesses opened or how they made their decision to find a location. We were trying to bring light to that through video form and then distributing it on the internet.
Speaker 3:I think everybody thought the world was going to fall down and fall apart once all these interest rates started rising. But we really haven't seen, I would say, the slowdown that I think people were expected. Is it slower? I would say maybe, but on the revenue side of things we're right there now with where we were last year.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics, from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, bill Vaughn Bank. Nick Pompein and Bucky Beeman are leading a new generation of commercial real estate professionals in southeast Minnesota Since 2014,. They've been business partners at Realty Growth Inc in Rochester, founded by Nick's father in 1978. Nick and Bucky are bringing an innovative approach to the industry, embracing technology, understanding the power of the internet and sharing unique stories. They're shedding a positive light on how commercial real estate affects the community. Nick Pompein, bucky Beeman, welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. You're both partners in a professional commercial real estate company in Rochester, minnesota. Before we take a deep dive into this topic, share with us a bit about yourselves and your career journey, bucky.
Speaker 2:I was born and raised in Rochester, minnesota. I ended up going to elementary school here, high school here, born and raised through business with my father. He had a business called Snappy Stop. It still does to this day, so grew up going there and working, riding my bike from home to that small business. And my mom's a school teacher, so I fortunately didn't have her as a teacher.
Speaker 2:That was my sister that had to deal with that and really love Rochester and have a lot of memories here in Rochester growing up and have enjoyed to see the community grow and had an entrepreneurial spirit early on in my path that my dad really helped me get and as a result I tried many businesses but ultimately the business that stuck was real estate and that's what led me to meeting Nick.
Speaker 1:Great lead in Nick. Give us a little bit about you and your history, and what led you to become a partner with.
Speaker 3:Bucky. Much like Bucky, I too am a townie and I say that very proudly. Like Bucky, I love Rochester, born and raised, and Bucky and I have very similar stories, considering the fact that he had a father that was in business and owned his own business and my father did too. My father began started Realty Growth in 1978, started doing that and went into other things and, like Bucky, I worked in the family business. So even I remember as a three-year-old, I remember dressing up in my suit and tie and going with my dad to the real estate office which was on 1812 Second Street Southwest, and my grandma was a secretary, and I remember I would go to work with my dad and so I started to learn the business when I was like three, I would say, and we also had the hotel downtown and every Saturday my brothers and I would go. My grandma worked the front desk on the weekend, so we would go to work and I would usually sit at the front desk with my grandma and write on sticky notes numbers and attach them to registration cards. We didn't have computers back then, so grew up in what I would say the family business, whether it was a hotel or in real estate, and graduated from male high school.
Speaker 3:And then I went off to college in Northfield so not very far away and was planning on not doing real estate. And my father called me one day and we started the conversation just simply asked would you consider coming back home to Rochester and working with me? And you did, and I did, and I can say that was the best decision I ever made. What year was that? That would have been? My dad called me in 2000,. It would have been the summer of 2010. I graduated from college in nine. Yes, it would have been the early summer of 2010. I was up in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1:You came back to Rochester to work with your dad, who started Realty Growth Incorporated, which is now a business that you and Bucky are partners in, correct? So how did you two meet or become partners, bucky?
Speaker 2:I graduated in 2008 from Century High School and I had a dream to be a professional hunter.
Speaker 2:I wanted to travel around the country and eventually become the guy in front of the camera that was on these amazing adventures, chasing white-tailed deer and elk and bear and all these things, and so in high school I was already chasing that passion by creating videos, sending it out to people in the industry, and ultimately got a job right out of high school and June graduated. By September I was in North Dakota with an individual that was in the industry. I was behind the camera filming, and that led me to chase my dream all the way until December when my last hunt was in Minnesota, and I recognized through that short period of time that it somewhat took the fun out of what I really enjoyed growing up. It made it a business. It made it work, and not that I still didn't want to maybe pursue it, it just wasn't what I thought maybe it was supposed to be. So I came back. I met a friend of mine that I had went to high school with, who's two years older, and we started a lawn care, snow removal, irrigation type company, and we were both living in our parents' house, didn't know really what we were doing. We had another partner also at the beginning stages, so three partners in total and we just started knocking on doors trying to make money and convince people we could mow their lawns and do a nice job. And in about two years time I found out that maybe that wasn't what I necessarily want to do my entire life. I think there was a lot of late nights doing snow removal that really made me question my sanity and I decided to sell that business and focus on real estate again.
Speaker 2:Through happenstance, one of the individuals that was our customer had his real estate license. It was a part-time gig for him and he really saw the potential in myself and my then partner, jacob Hart, who now owns a real estate company as well, and he said you should get into real estate, you should get your license, you should pursue this as a potential career because there's a lot of opportunity in it and you too, young guys, seem extremely ambitious and willing to do what it takes to try to build something. So, after selling, the lawn care business started with this individual that was somewhat of a mentor learning about real estate and I wouldn't say that I blew the doors down by any means. I really did small deals. So Lee Small's single office spaces was just there to learn and eventually, through that journey, the mentor moved out of Rochester because his job took him somewhere else and I was kind of off on my own doing my own thing trying to figure it out and I enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:But I didn't really have that team camaraderie. And someone in the business brought up that Nick Pompein was moving back to town and I didn't know who Nick was. I knew who Ed was and never had met him His father Ed but I knew that he was a leader in the industry because of the years he had put in and the company he had built and so I felt as though I should get to know Nick and I somehow got his contact information reached out and we had breakfast at Cafe Presto on Second Street and we sat in the back they have like a little patio area and we just started chatting. And so that's how I originally met Nick and Long Story Short joined the firm, got a great opportunity to learn from Ed and some of the other veterans that were in the industry that were part of the firm Dick Land, where Jeff Teasius, bill Cole, was able to just be a sponge to all the education and knowledge they had from Rochester, and it was just a fascinating time at that moment because I remember one of Ed's comments was he had never seen the industry so slow.
Speaker 2:We are coming out of the recession slowly but surely? And my comment to that was I've never been so busy in my entire life, I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:I have so much to do and part of that was because I was willing to do small things that Ed had graduated past, he didn't have to do some of these transactions that I was participating in. But that was where Nick and I crossed paths and really our relationship started into a great thing of what it has become today.
Speaker 1:Nick, it's a 40 year history in Rochester, correct? This company yeah, over 40 years.
Speaker 3:Wow, it was established in 1978, actually in the basement of my well then grandmother's home, which is at 829 9th Street Southwest.
Speaker 1:I love the way you guys give the addresses to every is that just because you're in the industry? Probably yeah a little bit yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's just probably it's part of our history too. But yeah, I mean, like Bucky, we both lived here and grown up here and we kind of know this town.
Speaker 2:I mean you do say we know this town.
Speaker 3:So yeah, we've been in. If I'm not mistaken, we are the longest continually running commercial real estate brokerage in Rochester. A lot of history here in Rochester and you know, like Bucky's story too. Just I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I graduated from Mayo High School in 2005 and, like a lot of kids in Rochester, thought I was gonna become a doctor. I went off to college at St Olaf in Northfield, went in as a chemistry pre-med major and that lasted one year and I was pretty down on myself because I was like, well, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I remember calling my parents and saying I don't think I'm cut out for this and they encouraged me and said Nick, you are, you know, just stick it out, you gotta find what you're passionate about. So I ended up going into history because I was like well, I'm passionate about history.
Speaker 3:I love history. So I graduated with a history major Once again, not knowing what am I gonna do with a history major and moved up to Minneapolis because I decided I was gonna go to law school, moved in with two of my buddies, so we got this apartment in Minneapolis and I got an odd job. I worked for, actually, csm Corporation in their hospitality division, because that's all I knew. I only worked at the hotels growing up. So that's what I knew. And, like I said, my dad called me randomly one day and just asked the question and it didn't really cross my mind. I had gone into the office throughout high school and college just intermittently Again, you know, met with my dad and had conversations with him. I thought it was a really great business. But because I had two older siblings who did their own thing and my younger sister, I knew she wasn't gonna be going into the business.
Speaker 3:I thought I had to do my own thing, and so that mindset, unfortunately. I wish I would have thought about this earlier, but the reality of things is, I got to where I'm at because my dad simply made that full call and ask, and that was Truly a life-changing experience for me. So I moved back then what would have been the summer of 2010, and I initially started working at the Brentwood in Suites, downtown, to kind of learn the I would say, the managerial side, and my dad said if you want to know this business, you have to learn every single facet of it. So for six months it was pretty intense. I, every day, that's what I did. I wasn't even in the real estate business yet and Literally one day, the GM she said she called my dad and said okay, he's ready, he knows everything, I know, I don't know what you want me to do anymore. Like he doesn't want my job, right, and I'm like no, no, no, no, that's not the point. So my dad says dad, what do I do now? Like he said leave your license.
Speaker 3:Okay, I also got my real estate license, and so this would have been 2011, and that's when buggy was one of the first people that I actually met. I didn't know who it was. I didn't know anybody hardly, and so, like bucky said, we met at cafe presto and that is I know exactly where we said it's just one of those moments in time that I will never forget, because it was truly the beginning of bucky and I's, first of all, our friendship and our relationship as as partners, and it's just an event in time that, like I said, I'll never forget and Ever since it's been, it's been really great, based in Rochester, how big of a geography do you serve I?
Speaker 2:Like to say we're focused in Southeast Minnesota. We've done transactions that have been Northern Minnesota, a little bit in Minneapolis, but it's not our focus and really what takes us there is our clients. We're not going and hunting for business, it's our clients that say we own a property in this area. You've done a great job in Southeast Minnesota for us. Will you help us? So Rochester is the core and then off of that we have listings and have done transactions along the River Valley. We've done transactions west towards Mankato. We've done transactions south past Racine and Into the border close to Iowa. But Minnesota southeast is where our focus is.
Speaker 1:So you got training from the best and, on top of that, you've really created Something unique about how you do your business, and I'm really intrigued by that approach, because a lot of it's around how you deliver content, how you Create your messaging and storytelling, and then ultimately, how that Works into transactions. Can you talk about your approach to real estate today, in 2023? Yeah, I'll have.
Speaker 3:Bucky do that because he's really truly the brainchild on this and it's quite phenomenal actually. So Bucky could probably talk about it best.
Speaker 2:So I think it goes back to my hunting days of Telling stories and how those stories ultimately led to a potential position that could be a career in that storytelling. And when I got into real estate I somewhat lost that storytelling Side of my brain because I wasn't doing any of that. But I did still understand the power of technology and the power of the internet because I was at an age that I had started using it Back to I am and AOL and all of those things and Commercial real estate. For me when I went online there wasn't a lot of activity on the internet related to commercial real estate. So one thing that distinctly stands out is when I sat down with Ed and Nick at some point I said, ed, you have a lot of great listings, we need to get your properties listed on the internet. And Ed had said why would we do that?
Speaker 2:And I had already seen the power in the internet because I was putting not great listings again, small office spaces and small little basically spaces that property owners would give me the permission to list on the internet, and it generated a lot of leads and those leads then turned into business and so getting the opportunity to have someone like Ed allow us to put his properties out there led to even more leads. And again back to I was never as busy as I had been in my life because those leads continually kept coming, thanks to the internet. So we put our properties on there and business started growing slowly but surely and I wanted to continually push the boundaries, to just be better at marketing, and some of these internet platforms gave you the option to put videos on there, and if you go onto my personal YouTube you can see some of those videos and they're extremely laughable.
Speaker 2:The early days, and if you think I look young now, I really look young then holy buckets and it was doing what I had done in the hunting industry of just filming some tours of properties and then putting them out to the internet. Through that I started following a guy on YouTube called Gary Vee, and Gary Vee is a leader in business in many ways. He understands new age marketing. He understands many things over and above my head, such as NFTs and Bitcoin and all this stuff I don't understand. But where I really got attracted to his content was his storytelling and content creation type of mindset and there was a time in he started sharing about Snapchat that if you're a business owner, you need to be active on Snapchat. And I opened up Snapchat had no friends on it because it wasn't on platform I had in high school and there was no followers per se. But what I started doing is what he shared to do is document your day. So I documented my day from I'm at the gym to I'm going into the office to. We had a secretary at the time that I would walk into the office and I would say how is business at Realty Growth? And she would say growing and it just became a thing, and how I got the idea of that thing was again from Gary leading me to a guy named DJ Khaled that he had a guy on his Snapchat that would say how is business? And the kid would say, boom. I was like we can do that at Realty Growth. That's easy enough, and so I started telling my story on Snapchat of what I was doing on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:That eventually led to other platforms recognizing that they needed a story function. Instagram got stories, facebook got stories. So I ended up creating stories on all of those platforms and for some reason, I always have felt like I need a thing of something that people can remember. And I think it goes back to the hunting days. As you created a DVD of your hunting journey, you had to put a label on it. One of my first labels and names was Minnesota Monsters, and it was my buddies and I Turkey hunting all over Rochester, and so I had to come up with what was the title, and the title became the Thursday Market Update, and the Thursday Market Update was sharing, via Snapchat or these other platforms, what is new in the Rochester area. And I will say one guy that extremely inspired me to do that besides Gary Vee is Jeff Keiger, a local journalist in town From the Post Bulletin Because he was doing it in the written form and I wanted to expand on his written form to where I could do it in the video form and share even more. He only gets so much room every single publication of the PB when it comes out and so I, with the video form, could tell so many more moments in a matter of a Thursday. So I started doing that probably I'm guessing six, seven years ago, and that has slowly developed into our marketing strategy of what it is today.
Speaker 2:To be as short and summarize as possible, what is our marketing strategy, it's sharing about updates and news that is happening in the Southeast Minnesota business community, bringing light to businesses all over. Sharing those stories on social media YouTube, instagram, facebook. We're really trying to build out our YouTube. Now we have two marketing guys on our team and by sharing those stories, the leads, the opportunities continually keep coming, just like they did when we listed the properties on LoopNet.
Speaker 2:Now that we're sharing about this world, that for many years was really behind the scenes, commercial real estate was something that you just didn't know how it necessarily worked or how businesses opened or how they made their decision to find a location. We were trying to bring light to that through video form and then distributing it on the internet. So it's a unique way because, again, the industry is not that. For many years it was always Ed and some other few people that did transactions and they didn't have to share much about what they're doing because some of it wanted to be in private, in the business realm, but they didn't even understand if there was an opportunity to share some of it in the public realm because it just was foreign language to them. And I think through our leadership and through them giving us the leash to go and just do, we've really created something special for our company, but also for our industry. It's different than what it has been for many years.
Speaker 1:And Nick, that also has evolved into a podcast, correct, yeah, and the podcast is pretty great.
Speaker 3:So we started that oh man, I'm trying to even remember that was four years ago, probably five years ago that we started doing that and then they kind of tailed off a little bit and then we really started picking it back up recently and that's just been a lot of fun. Bucky, once again brainchild. Bucky really is the brainchild with all of this. He's the champion and I think we're very grateful for that. I know I personally am, because I hear it all the time. My wife is at Mayo and she'll be like oh, so-and-so in the operating room said today that she saw Bucky's Thursday market update and it's like this is so cool, right. So like we're not only reaching, like you know, the people in the real estate world, you know, we're reaching scrub techs, we're reaching physicians, we're reaching all these different people that are paying attention to what has been done. And once again, this is Bucky's brainchild and he's been truly the one that's been championing this.
Speaker 3:So the podcast for us has been really great and it's something that I actually really enjoy as well. I think it's just, it's an easy thing for me to do. Personally, I think I sometimes get a little nervous on the screen. Even though I'm very much an outgoing extraverted person, I think it's just something about having a camera in your face or something that maybe just makes me a little bit so like a podcast for me is it's a little bit easier to deal with because it's just me talking to someone. So it's been a. That's been a really fun thing. It's been a great focus on essentially the small business community is what we've really done and Bucky and I've kind of tag team that we have a couple of other people that we're getting involved in the office as well. I know Gunner in our office has done one and it's slowly what Bucky has created. It's slowly getting into everybody else's blood because it's kind of contagious.
Speaker 1:What's the name of the podcast?
Speaker 2:Real growth podcast and it's on most platforms. We do the video form on YouTube.
Speaker 1:It's great. I've seen and listened because you can do both. Yep, it's great, and I think that my perspective is. I know this is a business strategy for you, business development strategy for you, but I kind of look at it as a why Rochester, like you're telling stories about why this is such a cool region to live in and to do business into.
Speaker 2:And I think we're telling the story that it's possible and that's like in the theme of real growth. It's like bringing out we just did one this morning and recorded with a chiropractor that shared his story from high school to opening his business, which is now eight weeks old, and like letting people know what goes into it and how it can come to fruition.
Speaker 1:We're definitely going to tag that when we post this. Thank you, so your professionals in the commercial real estate business world. Let's talk a little bit about how things are going in the industry and maybe a 2023 mid-year report.
Speaker 3:I would say that we've been extremely busy. In fact, our company is the biggest that it's ever been. When Bucky and I started, there were probably seven of us total, seven of us total or now getting close to 20. And so we just have to keep adding people and with that it's. You know all these efforts that are, you know whether it's the marketing just getting out to know people, all these things.
Speaker 3:We're really seeing a lot of growth on our side of business and I know, with interest rates and things like that, people are a little bit concerned on, hey, where's the market heading Now?
Speaker 3:Of course, there's been a little bit of a sure slow down.
Speaker 3:People are a little bit more cautious, yes, but there's definitely deals getting done and I can say that we're being more aggressive as a company and we can talk about that a little bit too.
Speaker 3:But also transactionally, we're still seeing quite a few transactions. So if I look at year over year, I would say we're even a little bit ahead of last year, and that's crazy for me to think about at this stage, because I think everybody thought the world was going to fall down and fall apart once all these interest rates. The interest rates started rising, but we really haven't seen, I would say, the slow down that I think people were expecting. Is it slower, I would say maybe, but on the revenue side of things we're right there now with where we were last year, so I think things are going great. There's still a lot of interest in Rochester, a lot, and I think with Mayo announcing their big plans again, that kind of started this uptick again. But no, rochester has been an incredible place for us to do business, to raise our families, to be raised, and I see that continuing to happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would go into a few examples of where we're seeing business and how things are going.
Speaker 2:I think that business has always been challenging, so small business owners are having to navigate a new realm of ways of doing business and, as a result, I think for our business it helps because they're figuring out new ways to, if they're a restaurant tour, provide a product in a quicker, more convenient, more mobile-friendly, fast-pace world and, as a result, they want to talk to us about new concepts. They want to talk to us about maybe downsizing a location. It's still challenging because costs have gone up if they're looking to build out a space, but that is challenges that, with the right team, can be overcome, and we're a part of that team and we're helping several people get over those hurdles. When we talk about, let's say, office space, that's an interesting world right now as well, as we all know, the headlines of downtown is not doing as well as it once did due to the employees that were working downtown or now working from home, and I think that's certainly a place we have to try to navigate. There still is a lot of people downtown.
Speaker 2:I'm here to tell you thanks for getting the sandwich bill before this and you said it there's a line on the door, but it's a new downtown in the way that it functions, in the way that spaces need to be reimagined. So there is thousands of square feet of vacancy and we are at the forefront of some conversations that are extremely exciting of what these vacancies could become. And as much optimism and excitement I have for the new uses, I will tell you that it doesn't come without extreme amounts of risk from someone that's going to get a loan to try to change the uses, to extreme amount of imagination to try to change it from what was standard office space to a new use entirely, for example office space to residential yeah that's a big one.
Speaker 3:That's what a lot of people are doing. If you look at a national stage as well, that's what people are looking into. But we all know that the costs associated with that, like Bucky alluded to, are just pretty astronomical to change an office building into some type of residential. But it makes a lot of sense and people are doing it. It's just getting the right players around the table to make something like that happen.
Speaker 2:We participated in a change of use in one of the oldest buildings in downtown Rochester that had Patterson-Dahlberg Law Firm in it as the last user, and now there's a really cute quaint restaurant and they're called Merrill Restaurant and this young couple it's their first brick and mortar they've done pop-ups prior Beautiful. Oh, that's amazing, khoma. I feel like it's just a small example. It's a huge investment but it's a small example of what can be done relative to size of space. It's like 1500 square feet and going in there now you just can't imagine. It was office space almost. And that is, I feel, like a look into what the future could be, with the right people around the table, to some of these spaces that are sitting vacant currently because there isn't office users in there cubicles or desks.
Speaker 1:Before we wrap, I have one final question. As you think about your work in commercial real estate, what excites you about the future?
Speaker 3:Nick, I think there's just there's so much opportunity in Rochester and Rochester has been so good to us and for me it's also just working with the right team. Bucky and I have been partners now since 2014. I'm our business, we've seen growth and we have a really truly a wonderful team around us and I know that with that team, we're only as good as our team and I'm really excited for just the growth that Rochester is experiencing still and there's still a lot of excitement around Rochester and there's a lot of excitement with our young team, and so I'm just really excited for the next 40 years of commercial real estate because there's so much opportunity out there.
Speaker 2:Bucky.
Speaker 2:I would echo all of that and then I would take a approach into the industry as a whole.
Speaker 2:This industry has often, as I mentioned, been behind the scenes and not been very transparent as to how things get done, and thanks to the internet and thanks to creators like our firm and others that I'm seeing in other parts of the country, there is light being shed on how commercial real estate affects a community.
Speaker 2:And the way that it affects a community is it can help activate a place, a city, into something that it has never been before, and we are trying to help educate and trying to help share what we are a part of in Rochester, thanks to the small businesses that believe in us to help them find the right location online, and if we share those stories online and if we bring light to them, I think ultimately it's going to help affect other communities positively by educating the commercial real estate agents, their role in how they help a community and also helping educate small business owners that it is absolutely possible to chase your dream and get something open.
Speaker 2:So I am super excited that our firm is really getting into stride related to this storytelling and the community is open to being a part of the storytelling, which is an amazing place to be as well. More business owners recognize the power of the internet and power of social media and video storytelling to where they're inviting us in and allowing us to get behind the scenes as to what it takes to open a business.
Speaker 1:Well, you are both shedding a great light on the work you were doing in Rochester and Southeast Minnesota. I want to thank Nick Pompein and Bucky Beeman for being our guests on Growing Destinations.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in to the Growing Destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Find out more about Rochester, Minnesota, and its growing arts and culture scene, its international culinary flavors and award-winning craft beer by visiting experiencerochestermncom.