Office Relocation Firm Didn’t Wait for Clients : Real estate: Broker took aggressive approach to finding customers. He knew when leases would expire and was there to offer cheaper digs.

It was a cold, rainy day in February when Wayne Lee Williamson visited the office of Shannon Haney, who operates one of Orange County’s largest bankruptcy trustee services.

Williamson made Haney an offer she couldn’t refuse: a 25% discount on her office lease payments for the next six years if she moved to a nearby location. After reviewing the new office, Haney grabbed the offer and in July moved the 33 employees of her company, Shannon Haney Chapter 13 Trustee.

Companies always search for ways to cut their expenses, especially during a recession, and trimming rent is among their priorities, said Williamson, president of First American Business Properties Inc., a commercial real estate broker.

With 12 years of experience as a commercial broker, Williamson said he was earning more than $100,000 in commissions at a Newport Beach real estate investment firm. He said he thought that the timing was perfect to start his own commercial brokerage. 1986 was a boom year for real estate. Banks were eager to lend money, and investors poured money into commercial real estate projects.

It was in this promising environment that Williamson began a brokerage from the kitchen of his Irvine apartment. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave a cushy job, but Williamson said he had a burning desire to provide more for his wife and seven children.

But within months after opening his company, the commercial real estate market began to falter. The stock market crashed, credit tightened and business dried up. His company grossed only $19,000 in 1986 and $39,000 the following year.

Williamson said it was a most trying experience for him and his wife, Stella, an aspiring television actress.

“We ate potatoes, rice and beans for the most part of two years,” he said. “There were nights when we went to bed hungry. It was horrible.”

There were times when the Williamsons couldn’t come up with their rent; the family could have been evicted were not it for an understanding landlord, he said.

Williamson changed his marketing style in the spring of 1988 and got his company’s sales out of the basement. He began to canvass property managers in Santa Ana’s central business district to track leases and their expiration dates.

“We didn’t wait for customers to come to us, we went to them,” he said.

Six months before leases expire, Williamson would offer the tenants lower rents on similar floor space at competing buildings. Williamson is paid a finder’s fee by property owners--a percentage of the total value of the new lease or of the purchase price of a property. The tenants or buyers are not charged, he said.

From then through fall 1989, his company arranged for the sale of 18 commercial buildings on Broadway in Santa Ana.

Williamson said he learned this technique of tenant relocation in the 1970s as a student intern with a large Canadian developer, Oxford Development Co., in Los Angeles. He had almost forgotten it because “most American brokers are order takers,” he said. “They install signs on properties or advertise in newspapers and wait for drive-by inquiries or calls from prospects.

As Williamson refined his research and marketing skills, sales started to grow, reaching $1 million in 1989 and $2.1 million last year. Despite the recession, Williamson said he expects revenues to remain stable this year.

Today, Williamson’s 16-person company is ensconced in an expansive Santa Ana office furnished with early American traditional furniture. First American Business Properties is the only black-owned commercial real estate brokerage in Orange County.

Williamson, who grew up in a small Ohio town where the tallest buildings were two stories, mused about how he got started in real estate:

Wanting to earn some money, a scraggy, 9-year-old Williamson persuaded a local newspaper to give him a paper route.

He was good at going door-to-door selling subscriptions, and two years later was chosen the top carrier in his district. As a reward, Williamson was sent with nine other paper carriers on a weeklong trip to New York City.

Williamson said one look at the gleaming towers of Manhattan convinced him that he wanted to build and own tall buildings when he grew up. He returned home a changed person, he said. He became more ambitious and determined to succeed. When he saved enough money, he left his hometown to attend the University of Southern California to pursue his dream.

Now, 36 years after he first stood on the concrete crown of the Empire State Building in Manhattan, Williamson, 47, is brokering commercial property deals on large office buildings.

“There’s plenty of money, plenty of business and plenty of opportunity in Orange County, and I don’t feel I’m in competition with anyone,” he said.