Alexis Odgers
Alexis Odgers, 26
Associate at Avison Young
A great broker must have four traits: A strong work ethic. A willingness to pivot. A genuine interest in the actual business of real estate. And a touch of razzle-dazzle.
This explains why Alexis Odgers is so impressive after such a short period of time as a broker.
A willingness to pivot can be seen in the fact that she left college at the University of South Carolina following one path, but quickly realized she needed to be on a different one.
“I started my career in consulting,” Odgers explained. She did a stint at Crowe, the accounting, consulting and tech firm. “I always enjoyed working with people to solve problems while forming and managing client relationships. It’s not like I didn’t like consulting, per se, but I wanted to be even more client facing.”
Odgers studied for her real estate license on the side (see trait No. 1) and joined Avison Young two years ago. There, she has worked on the team handling Kroll, the financial advisers, on the 48,026-square-foot lease it signed at 1 World Trade Center — and Odgers also worked on leasing out the 91,019 square feet Kroll had to extract itself from at Park Avenue Plaza.
In the last year, Odgers closed 287,484 square feet in acquisitions and dispositions over 21 transactions, and she currently has a pipeline of 341,425 square feet of Class A office space and 11 tenant assignments collectively looking for approximately 121,000 square feet.
Odgers was probably always destined to get into some real estate job, as it was in her blood (trait No. 3). Her parents (an orthopedic surgeon and a financial adviser) own a few rental properties in her native Philadelphia, and when Odgers began getting her license her first thought before becoming a broker was that she would buy an investment property or two.
It was not the first switch Odgers had made — initially in college she was pre-med. And when she was younger she had even shinier ambitions: “I wanted to be a pop star,” Odgers said with a grin. “I thought I was going to be in a band.”
And there’s your razzle-dazzle.
