Benjamin “Benji” Berkowitz is Vice President at Colonial Commercial Real Estate in Fort Worth, Texas, and Co-Founder and Principal of Pearl Capital, a real estate investment firm he launched in 2025. He specializes in investment sales of single-tenant and multi-tenant retail properties, and also serves as exclusive tenant representative for Flytrex, an autonomous drone delivery company. In this conversation, he talks about the parts of brokerage that never show up in a closing announcement.
People think this is a job about buildings. Is it?
Not really. The building is the easy part to talk about because it has a square footage and a cap rate and a photo. What actually takes the time is everything around it: the estoppel that comes back wrong, the lender who wants one more rent roll reconciliation, the tenant who has a side letter nobody remembered to attach to the lease file. None of that shows up when a deal gets announced. People see a sale price and a property name. They do not see the three weeks before that where I am chasing down a signature or explaining to a buyer why a number on a CAM reconciliation does not match what the seller told them verbally two months ago.
What does a normal week actually look like?
Less glamorous than people picture. A lot of it is phone calls that do not lead anywhere yet. I am calling owners who are not selling, checking on tenants who might expand, following up with lenders on deals that are six weeks from closing. The visible part of brokerage is a listing going live or a deal getting done. The invisible part is the volume of contact that has to happen before either of those things is possible. I probably spend more hours on relationship maintenance than I do on any single transaction.
What is the part of a deal that surprises people who have never done one?
How much of it is paperwork discipline rather than salesmanship. People assume brokerage is about pitching a property or negotiating a price, and that is in there, but a huge share of whether a deal actually closes comes down to who is tracking the details. Who has the current rent roll. Who confirmed the tenant’s renewal option language. Whose job it is to make sure the title company has the right entity name. I have seen good deals slow down for weeks because nobody owned that tracking. Now I treat it as part of the job, not an assistant task.
You represent Flytrex on the tenant side. How is that different from the investment sales work?
It runs on a completely different clock. On the investment sales side, I am usually working around a seller’s timeline and a buyer’s financing contingencies. Tenant representation for Flytrex means understanding what a drone delivery operation actually needs from a site: sight lines, access, the kind of zoning and neighboring use that will not create friction once they are operating. It is a different set of questions than “will this property produce good cash flow for an investor.” I have to think about operations first and investment return second, which is a useful discipline to carry back into the retail sales side.
What do sellers misunderstand about what you do for them?
Some sellers think the job ends once we agree on a price. It does not. The price is maybe a third of the work. The rest is managing the buyer through diligence without losing the deal, keeping the tenants calm if they get nervous about a sale, and making sure nothing surfaces late that blows up the timeline. A seller who thinks the hard part is over at signed contract is usually the seller who calls me most in week three of due diligence, confused about why things have slowed down.
What made you build this kind of tracking discipline in the first place?
Early on I lost deals I felt like I had done everything right on, at least on paper. When I went back and looked at what actually happened, it usually was not the pitch or the relationship that fell apart. It was something small that got missed: a document that sat too long, a follow-up that did not happen fast enough. That pushed me toward treating the unglamorous parts of the job as seriously as the parts that get attention. Pipeline and credibility come from consistency on the boring stuff, not from one good presentation.
How does that carry into how you run Pearl Capital?
Pearl operates on the acquisition side, so the tracking discipline shows up differently. Before we buy anything, we go through leasing files, tenant history, and property condition line by line. It is slower than people expect from an investment firm. But the properties we target, unanchored and junior-anchored neighborhood centers, live or die on tenant mix and lease terms that are easy to overlook if you are moving fast. Our first acquisition, a shopping center in Wichita Falls, went through that same process before we closed it in October 2025.
What do you wish people understood about brokerage before they got into it?
That the job rewards patience with detail more than it rewards charisma. I do not think that is what most people picture when they think about commercial real estate. There is a version of this business that looks like closing dinners and big numbers. There is another version that is just spreadsheets, phone calls, and knowing exactly where a document is at any given moment. I spend most of my time in the second version. The first version only happens because of the second one.
What has stayed the same for you since you started?
The instinct to break a big goal down into steps I can actually act on this week. That has not changed since I started at Colonial. Whether it is a transaction or building out Pearl Capital, the size of the goal does not matter as much as whether I have a concrete next step in front of me. Most of what people never see in this job is exactly that: the small steps between the goal and the announcement.