SPIRE Member Profile - Brad Geier
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Brad Geier, a Charter Member of the Stanford Real Estate Council, is this month’s member profile.
Brad is Co-Managing Partner at Merlone Geier Partners, a private real estate investment company focused on the acquisition, development and redevelopment of retail and retail-driven mixed-use properties on the West Coast.
Primarily focused on community and neighborhood shopping centers, Merlone Geier Partners and its predecessor, M&H Realty Partners, have been actively investing in West Coast retail property since 1993, acquiring to date more than 90 West Coast properties representing 13 million square feet and 1,500 acres of land.
Brad and co-manager Peter J. Merlone have raised more than $2.3 billion of discretionary institutional equity capital over the past 17 years, just recently closing their tenth fund, Merlone Geier Partners X, L.P., which has $600 million in capital commitments.
But getting to the top in West Coast commercial real estate started very humbly just after Brad graduated from Stanford University in 1979 – with a degree in history.
“I was a history major at Stanford so you might there’s not a direct link between what I studied and my profession. But I think the value of the education – learning to think critically and communicate effectively, both orally and in writing – just the benefit of a broad, generalist background, has been helpful to me in my role as a real estate investor and developer,” Brad says.
He started his own company right out of Stanford selling what today would be reverse annuity mortgages.
“I learned a lot about what I didn’t know in that process,” he says with a laugh. “Ultimately, our effort was unsuccessful. But I did get the real estate ‘bug.’”
In Silicon Valley, nothing quite succeeds like a bit of failure. Brad was quickly back in the game, first going to Harvard University where he earned his MBA.
“The history background was helpful but I needed a little shoring up,” he says.
From 1983 to 1993, prior to the formation of the first M&H fund, Mr. Geier held senior positions with Trammell Crow Company and The Taubman Company. At Trammell Crow Company, he was a leasing agent, project partner and ultimately the divisional partner in charge of the firm’s Southern California retail division.
In 1991, he joined the Taubman Company to oversee the planning, construction, leasing and ultimate sale of a 70 acre mixed use development in Orange County that included a 600,000 square foot power center.
Brad was a managing director of M&H Realty Partners at its founding in 1993.
While much of his career has been in Southern California, Brad has maintained close ties with Stanford.
“Stanford was meaningful to me, not just academically [he graduated with departmental honors], but certainly in the relationships that I built during that time,” he says. “Many of those relationships have been sustained over the last 30 years. I’ve been interested in helping the university further its efforts.”
He has also gotten a different perspective as a parent: Three of his children have been Stanford students. Two have graduated and the third is a junior at Stanford.
And there’s an older tie. His father was in public relations and development for Stanford in the early 1960s.
“I think one of Stanford’s great strengths is the sense of community, the Stanford ‘family,’” Brad Geier says. “I think that the Stanford family is very real. It’s not something the university simply pays lip service to.
“One of the ways it comes through is the strong alumni ties. Certainly SPIRE as a subset of that, focused on those that happen to have careers in real estate, furthers the sense of the Stanford community being a family.”
