As a tenant representative team, we work on a daily basis negotiating leases on behalf of tenants; not on behalf of the landlord. Several months ago we received an urgent phone call from one of our good clients. The client’s 400,000 sq.ft. Memphis warehouse had been destroyed overnight by a massive series of tornado. This warehouse was a critical distribution hub for the client, supplying hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory to major retailers in the U.S. When dealing with major retailers, there are no excuses for failing to deliver product on a timely basis. If the client couldn’t make deliveries on time, the retailers would simply replace them with a competitor’s product. Failure was not an option, the distribution hub had to be replaced immediately.

We received our first frantic call from the client at about 8:30 AM the morning after the tornado hit. Because I was en route to another meeting, I turned over the initial phase of the project to my partner, Eddie Edson. Scrambling to find someone, anyone, in the midst of massive area-wide destruction was no easy task given that power and telephone lines were down throughout the area. Eddie quickly tracked down the right team of senior brokers from our Memphis office and was able to enlist them immediately to join the team. Together with the product knowledge of our local experts and constant availability of the tenant’s real estate manager, we were able to succeed in exceeding all normal expectations.

To put the scenario into proper context, an assignment of this scale and magnitude, typically takes a year or more to complete. In this situation, we went from the first phone call, to the tenant loading inventory into their new building in less than 33 hours. The client was understandably ecstatic with the end result. As brokers, we were very proud to be able to get our client back in business so quickly.