This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the deal-makers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities who keep CRE interesting.
Deborah Smith has come a long way from milking cows and checking her rubber boots for recluse spiders.
After a childhood spent on a dairy farm, Smith moved to the U.S. 20 years ago to work for Morgan Stanley. After riding the waves of the best and worst of the U.S. economy, Smith now reigns as the CEO and co-founder of The CenterCap Group, a commercial real estate advisory firm that has been involved in more…

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A former partner at development firm TMG Partners has joined Four Corners Properties as a principal.

David Cropper signed on to the Los Altos-based commercial real estate firm as one of five principals overseeing its development and investment, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

He had served as managing director of San Francisco-based TMG, where he’d worked 22 years before making his way up to partner and leading development of a downtown project in Fremont. He left last year to travel the world with his wife.

While at TMG, Cropper was impressed with Four Corners founder Bruce Burkard and how his firm had turned the former Mayfield Mall in Mountain View into a 500,000-square-foot tech campus the firm sold to Google in 2016 for $225.4 million, or $451 per square foot.

“I always found the FCP team to be talented, practical and nimble,” said Cropper, who joined Four Corners in July, according to his LinkedIn page. “Now that I’m on the other side, I see that they’re very collaborative indeed.

“Good ideas seem to get attention regardless of who brings it up.”

Both Burkard and Cropper are one-time bankers. Despite setbacks in the Bay Area real estate market as companies forsake offices for remote work and higher interest rates stymie construction and sales, both hold high hopes for its future.

Burkard sees opportunities on the money side of real estate, as developers and property owners need to refinance deals inked before the pandemic.

Cropper insists it’s never keen to bet against the Bay Area.

“People who’ve been around here for a long time know it goes in cycles,” Cropper told the Business Times. “I think there are going to be assets that you can work on at prices maybe you haven’t seen in awhile, but there is an exciting opportunity to shape the future here.”

Four Corners Properties, founded by Burkard in 2005, has invested more than $1 billion in 50 commercial buildings containing 4.5 million square feet in Northern California, according to its website.

— Dana Bartholomew

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The post Developer David Cropper joins Four Corners Properties as principal appeared first on The Real Deal.

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