While some workers across corporate America express dread at resuming a commute as the pandemic shows signs of easing, brokerage executive Christina Roush is now facing commutes in two states — and said she's looking forward to it.
Roush, who just took over as managing principal of Cushman & Wakefield's San Diego market, is going to keep doing her other job as leader of the global brokerage's operations in Nevada. It makes sense because the two markets are a far better pairing than they seem at first glance, she said, but more about that in a second. First let's cover the big workplace topic of 2022: the commute.
The San Diego office where Roush will work when she's there is about 325 miles southwest of her office at Cushman & Wakefield Las Vegas. She'll spend part of each week in Vegas and Reno, Nevada, and in the San Diego area, where the brokerage has its new regional headquarters in Del Mar. It also has offices in downtown San Diego and Otay Mesa in south San Diego County and Carlsbad in the northern part of the county.
"Business needs tend to shape the time I spend between markets," she said in an interview. Roush has a home in Las Vegas "and always will" and has had a home in San Diego for the past four years, so sometimes she'll commute via plane and sometimes by car, depending on what's going on that week, and alternate weekends in San Diego and Las Vegas.
A Las Vegas native, the job is a good match for Roush, who has spent a lot of time and established deep business relationships in both Nevada and San Diego, having gone to college at the University of San Diego and worked for several years with CBRE in the Southern California city.
"I've known both markets my whole career," Roush said. "And I know San Diego like the back of my hand. So it's a natural progression."
More business comes into Nevada from California than from any other state, Roush said, as California-based companies relocate divisions to Nevada or pick areas such as Reno to serve as a hub for their distribution network. Nevada's tax abatements and lower cost of real estate play major roles in this, said Roush, who also leads Cushman & Wakefield’s private capital group that operates in 12 markets in the West.
While Northern Nevada attracts more industrial uses and investment from Northern California, the southern part of the state, anchored by Las Vegas, has long attracted developers and investors from Southern California, Roush said. As a result, Cushman & Wakefield's offices in Nevada and San Diego have a good amount of overlapping clients, she said.
"So it's actually going to be a tremendous boon for my people in Nevada for me to be able to connect the dots to a lot of institutional ownership and all the developers and investors that are based in Southern California," said Roush. In northern San Diego, "I'm a 30-minute drive from a lot of the money and decision-makers that lead investment funds and life [insurance] companies that are located in Newport Beach."
She said she has a strong relationship with Cody Cannon, Cushman & Wakefield's managing principal for California's Orange County and Inland Empire, and Phil Brodkin, the managing principal over the greater Los Angeles area.
Her goal is to foster collaboration, Roush said, creating a brokerage group "that I wished I could have worked at that never existed — a place where people trusted each other, a place where people admired each other, a place where people helped each other."
When it comes to diversifying commercial real estate, an industry that statistics show is dominated by white men, Roush said she will work to recruit women, Black professionals and other minorities.
"Given that there is a certain demographic profile that's been traditionally [represented in] commercial real estate, that leaves the demographic of everyone else to go after," Roush said. "I'm excited to do that. I'm excited to have commercial real estate look more like the rest of America."
Roush got into commercial real estate with a job at CBRE when she moved back to Las Vegas after graduating from college. If she hadn't become a broker, Roush said, she might have been a musician. In high school, she was a member of what she said was the world's first neon marching band. Years later, her love of the business has spread to her daughter, Elizabeth Roush, who is a Cushman & Wakefield broker specializing in medical real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Christina Roush is glad the industry is changing from her early days, when "I was one of only two women, three women in commercial real estate in Las Vegas at the time in the whole industry in the whole market."
These days, Roush's desk is filled with a long row of books, and a lot of them are about real estate and leadership.
"I'm really big on organizational change and working to improve teams," she said. "I'm reading a really great book that my office director got me that's authored by Stanley McChrystal," the retired general who oversaw U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The book is "Leaders: Myth and Reality." It profiles 13 leaders throughout history including Walt Disney, Coco Chanel and Robert E. Lee and focuses on why some succeeded and others failed.
"I've read all of Brené Brown's books," including "Dare to Lead," Roush said. "But also all of the things about all of her work on interpersonal skills around shame and confidence and making sure that we treat people with dignity, that kind of thing."