Scher-Voit Forms Division to Handle Retail Properties

Creating its own currents in a stagnant market, fast-growing Scher-Voit Commercial Brokerage Co. said Monday that it is forming a division to handle retail properties.

The new unit will operate initially out of Scher-Voit’s Anaheim office, and will eventually be expanded throughout its five-office system, said Gary Marquis, managing partner of the Anaheim office and a company vice president.

To drive its newest division, the brokerage has set up a team approach in which the retail unit’s brokers will be paid based on overall divisional sales. Typically, brokers are paid commissions only on properties they market--a system that fosters internal competition.

With this compensation approach, Marquis said, brokers will feel equally responsible for all properties listed by the unit and will share marketing efforts as well as intelligence about potential buyers and sellers.

Violating tradition has been the hallmark of Scher-Voit since the brokerage was formed in Irvine three years ago by Lawrence M. Scher, a longtime commercial broker, and developer Robert D. Voit, a scion of the Voit rubber family.

The company by early this year had grown from its original single Irvine office to five offices and about 150 brokers in Orange, San Diego and Los Angeles counties.

To open the retail division in Anaheim, the company has added four new brokers, despite the existence of what Marquis calls “a slow market” for retail properties--individual stores and neighborhood and strip shopping centers.

To keep his top brokers, Scher--president of the firm--has given them perks such as private offices and bigger shares of the commission on their sales than is typical in the industry.

And in 1988, Scher-Voit was sued for $1 million by rival Daum Commercial Brokerage Co. of Los Angeles--once Scher’s employer--for breaking an industrywide gentlemen’s agreement by allegedly raiding Daum’s Orange County offices and stealing away not only its best brokers but many of its best listings. The suit was settled privately last year with no admission of wrongdoing.

Marquis said that Scher-Voit’s tactics have been paying off. The company, which posted an annual leasing and sales total of $720 million last year, has more than doubled its business so far this year, he said.

“Even in slow times we are able to recruit high quality brokers and increase sales,” Marquis said.