Christian Oldenburg is four weeks into his job as managing director of the Colliers International Northeast Florida commercial real estate office. He grew up in Jacksonville and attended The Bolles School before graduating from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His employment in Jacksonville has spanned from NorthMarq Capital to Regency Centers Corp. to Block One Ventures.
I’m meeting with everyone individually and telling them my job is to increase profitability in the office, to drive the bottom line. One way is recruiting new brokers or looking at buying brokerages in Northeast Florida and even out into the Panhandle. The second is managing and developing what we’ve got here. We’ve got 28 brokers in this office. Another way is business development at a higher level, with corporate clients around town and landlords.
I went to school up in the Northeast and I thought I wanted to do a Wall Street-type job and I didn’t want to go to New York City. I went out to San Francisco and I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Boiler Room, but that’s basically what I was doing. I was on the phone all day, every day. At 250 phone calls, if you can set five appointments, you’re doing well. After about six months, I decided that was not what I wanted to do. I wasn’t bad at it. I just didn’t like it. That has a way of changing your success rate when you don’t like what you’re doing. As with most things Hollywood, the movie was a little overblown, but it’s not far off of my experience.
I moved back here and had a neighbor who runs NorthMarq Capital. He said, “Hey, how’d you like to come be an analyst for me?” It’s commercial mortgage banking. I said, “Sure, sounds great.” Everything else is history.
I moved down here when I was 6 or 7. I was born in Minnesota and my parents moved here when the Mayo Clinic opened. My father was a surgeon and I think he was in the original group of doctors that came down.
When I came back from California, a guy that I swam with at Bolles heard I was back in town and called me. “Hey, why don’t you come out with us? There’s this girl I think you’d really like and you need to meet her.” That was how I met my wife. A year or two after that, I started at Regency Centers. She was working at Regency Centers back in ’05 and they had a position for a senior financial analyst. She insisted I apply. I got the job.
For fun, I play with my kids. I have 3- and 5-year-old little girls. I like to exercise. I’ve got a 30-year-old house that’s new to me that I like to do DIY projects. I just painted my entire upstairs. That took some time, but I did it, so that was good.