Kyle Matthews of a Rebranded Matthews: 5 Questions

For Kyle Matthews, a rebranding isn’t just about cosmetics. It’s about aligning his company with what he says it already is: a “modern, tech-forward firm built for speed in the complexity of today’s market.”

In 2015, Matthews saw the opportunity to start his own boutique firm — then named Matthews Real Estate Investment Services — with only 15 to 20 employees. Five years later, the firm grew to about 300 people in eight offices, and now, 10 years later, it boasts more than 1,000 employees across more than 25 offices in the U.S.

Part of that 10-year milestone is a rebranding. The company has dropped the latter part of its previous title to simply become Matthews — a move its CEO says will streamline all of the firm’s business lines into one name.

Matthews CEO Kyle Matthews spoke with Commercial Observer this week to discuss the firm’s rebranding and expansion, as well as the job market and its effects on real estate.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: Matthews is marking its 10th anniversary with a rebranding to drop the latter part of its previous title. So why the rebranding now?

Kyle Matthews: Ten years is a big anniversary. It was a really good moment for us to sit down and look forward and say, “What do we want the next 10 years to look like?” So it just felt like the right moment. 

We really wanted Matthews to be synonymous with what we are, which is the most forward-facing technology firm within the commercial real estate space, which happens to be a brokerage firm. So, while keeping that as a driver, we also never want to lose sight that relationships ultimately remain at the heart of our business, and it’s the balance of relationships with this technology focus that really sets us apart.

Will the rebranding carry Matthews into other, bigger markets? Will there be more offices in New York City and along the East Coast?

The branding will … I wouldn’t say carry us, but it will accompany us. We were going to grow and continue to scale no matter what. If you just look at our track record, we’ve grown probably 40 percent in size, both in number of teammates as well as offices, while everyone else has kind of pulled back and gotten smaller. 

So we’re going to expand and grow and continue to scale and provide opportunities to commercial real estate professionals in certain markets and product types. The rebrand will, at worst, accompany us, and, at best, accelerate us in that expansion.

Matthews’ DJ Johnston said in 2023 that the firm’s New York focus on investment sales is carefully crafted by geography and property sector in somewhat of a “territorial system.” Is that still Matthews’ strategy?

You know, I always try to get away from football analogies, but it seems to be the only thing I ever use. We deploy agents no differently than a football team — you have a middle linebacker, you have a safety, a defense, a quarterback. And so we deploy agents based on product types and geographies, and then the size and scale of that depends on the density of the product in the market. To build a really successful brokerage business in a market like New York, it’s very geographical and by product type.  

So the answer to your question is yes, absolutely. We still have a geography- and product type-focused deployment.

Matthews made its first capital markets hire for its New York City office last year. How is the firm’s expansion into capital markets going, and how big might that business line get?

Andrew Marcus joined us about a year ago. He was already an established professional, but he’s absolutely crushed it. We want to match the level of activity and execution on the capital markets side of the business that we’ve built on the investment sales side. We’ve always had our eyes on the debt side of the business.

A couple years ago, we felt the timing was right to start to focus our attention on marrying our incredible investment sales platform with an equally competent, and ultimately equally productive, national debt platform. And we’ve already started to see that take shape in a very short amount of time.

Does the rebranding mean you’re hiring? What are your thoughts on the current job market?

We’ve already hired 250 people this year. I’m incredibly optimistic on the timing of growth of hiring professionals, both senior and junior professionals, because I think we’re in the first inning of a new recovery. I’m optimistic on rates. Values seem to have stabilized, which is always a great sign spreads have come in on the debt side. There’s more competition.

We hired, developed, trained, recruited and grew throughout the last three years, when, as far as I know, nobody else did. So you can only imagine what we’re going to do when there’s wind at our back again, which I think will be very soon. I’m really excited about what the market looks like moving forward.

We had the biggest annual revision in jobs history this week. We just saw 911,000 jobs revised out, which is a huge number. What does that mean for commercial real estate? Well, it depends on how bad it gets or doesn’t get. You’ll see unemployment rise a little bit as long as labor participation remains robust. But, if we actually start seeing consistent negative jobs reports coming back, we’ll see unemployment fly up and a massive pullback in the labor market. 

That would really create a deterioration in the operating fundamentals of real estate. For multifamily, people aren’t going to have their own bedrooms. They’re going to get a roommate when they lose their job, or they’re going to move home with their parents. For retail, people stop spending. For industrial, manufacturing is going to slow down. For office, companies go under.

I get the privilege of hosting a podcast, the “Matthews Mentality Podcast,” where I have leaders from across all industries — CEOs of public companies, CEOs of real estate companies, economists, business entrepreneurs — come in and talk about what’s going on. And so a lot of my opinion has been formed by having real-life conversations with leaders across industries on the podcast.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.