Savannah Zouzalik
Savannah Zouzalik, 29
Senior associate at Invesco Real Estate
From a young age, Savannah Zouzalik wanted to work in commercial real estate.
“My dad worked in the industry and still is my role model,” said Zouzalik, whose father worked on the debt side at PGIM Real Estate. “I was the weird only fourth grader that wanted to have a commercial real estate career instead of becoming a pop star.”
Zouzalik’s journey into the commercial real estate world took hold when she graduated the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) with a business administration degree and moved back to her childhood home of Dallas to work as a DUS underwriting analyst at NorthMarq Capital. She then decided to relocate to Nashville and discovered her next opportunity — bringing her briefly into the leasing end of the business after exchanging business cards with a leasing broker during a tailgate for an Ole Miss-Vanderbilt football game.
After working in Cushman & Wakefield’s Southeast multi-family advisory group in Nashville for two years, Zouzalik returned to Dallas to earn an MBA from Southern Methodist University (SMU). She joined Invesco at the firm’s Dallas office following an internship while at SMU.
At Invesco, Zouzalik’s team generally focuses on loans within the $50 million to $150 million range in the Southeast and the middle of the U.S. She has targeted most heavily the multifamily and industrial sectors, two markets that have fared well amid headwinds facing other CRE assets during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Being still very young in the industry, Zouzalik is focused on learning as much as she can as the CRE industry confronts market volatility with rising interest rates.
“I’m trying to learn and absorb everything going on in the market and better position myself for when things return to a sense of normalcy,” she said. “I don’t think there’s ever going to be a point where I’m not learning something new every day, because this industry is just full of interesting people and different perspectives.” —A.C.
