Paul Klick, a commercial associate for Coldwell Banker, stands on 138 acres in northern Manatee County last month that will become Buckeye Industrial Park. The park, between Port Manatee and Interstate 75, will have 37 lots for warehouses and manufacturing.
SARASOTA -- Serious commercial real estate experience: That is what Paul Klick brought to Coldwell Banker when he signed on as an associate broker in January 2006.
Klick, 62, spent nearly 30 years working for commercial real estate divisions of the Equitable Life & Casualty Insurance Co., working his way up from financial analyst to commercial mortgage originator to workout specialist, and eventually heading up the company's national asset sales division.
Then, after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, Klick helped build EQ Services, a subsidiary of Equitable Real Estate, into the largest mortgage servicing and asset management organization in the country with more than $22 billion in assets under management.
Klick says his long and varied career in commercial real estate, and especially his experience with resuscitating rundown projects, taught him that there is always opportunity no matter how bad things get.
"A lot of young people in the business have never seen a downturn," Klick said. "I've gone through four of them now. Even when things are down, there's a way to work through it and make a living."
Born in New Jersey in 1944 -- the son of an engineer, Klick joined the Air Force at the height of the Vietnam war. But Klick, who was 23 at the time, never made it to Southeast Asia.
A graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College with some engineering courses under his belt, Klick was quickly promoted to captain and was put in charge of aircraft maintenance at Loring Air Force Base in Maine.
The Air Force obviously liked Klick, offering to pay for an engineering degree. But that would mean committing 12 to 15 years to the military and moving from base to base all over the world.
So he returned to New Jersey in 1971 and went to work as a financial analyst, calculating stock and bond returns for Equitable's pension fund clients.
Drawn to real estate finance by two of his professors, Klick asked to be transferred to Equitable's commercial mortgage division when he graduated in 1974.
Four years later, he was promoted to head the portfolio management team for one of Equitable's largest clients -- the Teamsters Pension Fund for the central, southeastern and southwestern states.
Klick said the job introduced him to "a lot of characters," including a man who was identified in Steven Brill's book, "The Hoffa Wars," as a Chicago mobster.
Rife with experience from his involvement in one of the most explosive real estate markets in the country, Klick moved back east in 1989 to help Equitable manage the fallout from the savings and loan crisis.
His new position in Equitable's Atlanta headquarters was as senior vice president in charge of selling part of Equitable's $4 billion commercial real estate portfolio.
His answer was to launch a division within Equitable that would take distressed properties, package them into pools and sell them to Wall Street companies that would convert them into commercial mortgage-backed securities and sell those securities to investors.
"We would take properties, many of which had been foreclosed on by banks and were in the development stage, and we would figure out what to do with them," Klick said. "We would work out the problems and turn the properties into viable assets."
In 1996, Equitable sold EQ Services, and Klick left the company to formed a commercial real estate advisory business with several partners. Because of one of those partners, former Equitable Real Estate President Doug Tibbetts, Klick ultimately bought a house on Longboat Key.
Tired of commuting back and forth to Atlanta and Dallas, Klick first took a job with Zirkelbach Construction in Palmetto and then joined Coldwell Banker.
Klick is marketing two large commercial properties for Zirkelbach in Palmetto: The Buckeye Industrial Park, a planned 138-acre industrial park that borders on the Piney Point Phosphate Plant; and a 26-acre tract on Moccasin Wallow Road that is zoned for both retail and office development.
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