Kyle Matthews Injects Competitiveness Into His Firm’s DNA
Growing up in a famous football family, it’s no surprise Kyle Matthews encourages employees of his growing real estate brokerage to train hard and be prepared to go all out when competing for business.
When Matthews, founder, chairman, and CEO of Nashville-based Matthews Real Estate Investment Services, visits his firm’s offices, he turns them into competition venues. In games centered on winning real estate business, Matthews takes on the role of the property owner, and local brokers make their pitch for his business. Matthews knows what it takes to compete: He played college football for the storied University of Southern California Trojans — and seven members of his family played in the NFL.
The game has an audience, as Matthews gathers the office’s employees into a room to observe. The paramount rule is that the pitching agent needs to follow a 30-step checklist Matthews requires employees to know. As the pitch begins, the coworkers take notes based on how successfully the agent interacts with the CEO to learn to outpitch rival agents at competing firms in a tough economy for commercial real estate.
“You really have to make it the greatest pitch of your life,” Matthews said in a phone interview from his home in Telluride, Colorado. “Markets like today make great agents.
Matthews says the work ethic is paying off. The firm that specializes in commercial investment sales and leasing for properties including apartments, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, office, self storage and shopping centers said it completed 4,518 transactions totaling more than $14.25 billion in sales in 2022, a 56% year-over-year increase.
His company recently welcomed its largest class of new hires and interns to its summer training program. Moreover, Matthews added he has his sights on expanding the firm beyond the more than 20 U.S. markets in which it operates, even as the firm contends with a tough economy for real estate that’s prompted some of the country’s largest brokerages to cut costs and lay off workers.
But Matthews said he’s always seen distressed markets as opportunities to grow. He adds that it was the competitive intensity he learned playing football and overcoming struggles of the Great Recession as a younger broker that molded him into a tough real estate boss.
“We work harder than anyone else, and it’s not even close,” Matthews said. “It’s a different animal that signs up to work here.”
Discipline to Plan
Friends and co-workers who have known Matthews for decades say it’s not just talk and that Matthews acts like the person he comes across in interviews and motivational videos he posts on LinkedIn. In a recent video, Matthews told employees that their next workday should start at 9 the night before. That’s when he advises subordinates to write out the next day’s schedule, pick out clothes to wear and set their alarm to go to sleep.
Still, some Matthews employees said they enjoy the long hours because of Matthews’ inspiration and zeal for real estate. Chrisse Mulkey, who joined Matthews in May as vice president of innovation, said she instantly connected with Matthews and his motivation in 2007 when they met the annual ICSC retail conference in Las Vegas.
At the time, Mulkey was working at Marcus & Millichap, where Matthews served in a national role. Mulkey’s job at the show was to allot booths to brokers who needed space for client meetings. Matthews would stand next to her and wait for tables to open before demanding Mulkey let him have a spot to meet, she said.
“He was incredibly aggressive in his tenacity to be successful,” Mulkey said. “It isn’t a persona. He is who he is.”
Matthews wasn’t always disciplined while growing up in Southern California, he said in a recent video post on LinkedIn. By his own admission, Matthews said he was a “slacker, lazy guy.”
Then, Matthews went to the University of Southern California and learned discipline while playing football, he said in the video. It may have been in his blood: His family members playing in the NFL included brother and Green Bay Packers legend Clay Matthews III, who retired in 2019, as well as another brother, two cousins, his father, uncle and grandfather.
After a few years competing in the brokerage business, he watched the Great Recession crush the real estate industry. Matthews said he started to earn a lot less money but ended up improving his ability to compete during the downtown and recovery that followed. He won six consecutive national sales awards between 2007-2012 at Marcus & Millichap in the weakened real estate market.
Improvement Focus
“My skill sets just had to get better,” Matthews said.
After Marcus & Millichap, Matthews worked for a few years at Colliers before starting Matthews in April 2015 in El Segundo, California. Since then, the firm has moved its headquarters to Nashville and has grown to 21 U.S. offices and 600 real estate professionals.
Matthews said he worked hard and his firm has no board of directors, outside investors or debt. Matthews said he takes pride in being an emerging firm in an industry that has had the same cast of brokerage companies running it all for the past two decades.
“We’re really the first company in a generation that’s disrupted the old boys at the top,” Matthews said.
Matthews won’t discuss publicly where his firm plans to grow next because wants the firm to focus on what’s in front of it now. For the time being, at least, he enjoys training his team of real estate professionals to be disciplined in an industry that demanded similar toughness from him in his early years of his career.
“Nothing we do is rocket science,” Matthews said. “I’m a football player. I need my coach to tell me who to hit.”
