On the first day of February in 2023, Bhagyesha Darji left her job as an assistant controller at NAI Chase Commercial in Huntsville, Alabama, to become a commercial real estate sales professional. Three days later she was on an airplane bound for Las Vegas to attend the annual NAI Global convention. Her journey as a rookie broker had begun.
On the first day of February in 2023, Bhagyesha Darji left her job as an assistant controller at NAI Chase Commercial in Huntsville, Alabama, to become a commercial real estate sales professional. Three days later she was on an airplane bound for Las Vegas to attend the annual NAI Global convention. Her journey as a rookie broker had begun.
This podcast was recording just five months after she started working in brokerage. She has already closed a restaurant lease and an industrial sale, and is leaning toward focusing her career in investment sales. Yet as a tertiary market (the population of Huntsville is about 216,000 and the metro area is comprised of 500,000 people), Bhagyesha is likely to serve clients in a variety of property types and assets. In fact, she is helping a client with a search to acquire an operating hotel anywhere in the U.S. and priced between $4M and $7M.
Douglas McCullough, VP and CCIM at NAI Chase Commercial, is her mentor. Some of the time she works on a team with 3 or 4 other agents yet otherwise is building her own book of business.
Huntsville -- rich in engineering talent, is a rapidly growing community, and Bhagyesha, who grew up there, is one of its biggest fans. Two of the major corporate draws in the area are Redstone Arsenal and Cummings Research Park. Redstone Arsenal is a United States Army post and a census-designated place adjacent to Huntsville in Madison County. The Arsenal is a garrison for various tenants across the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and NASA.
Cummings Research Park, located primarily in the city of Huntsville, is the second largest research park in the United States and the fourth largest in the world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, IBM, Lockheed, Northrop, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville all soon located within the park, all of which grew tremendously.
A pair of the better-known tenants with a presence in Huntsville are Blue Origin, the rocket manufacturing company owned by Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX, the rocket company owned by Elon Musk.
To accelerate her learning curve in brokerage, Bhagyesha started a Rookie’s ‘club’ as part of the North Alabama Commercial Realtors Association, or NALCOM, and helps organize regular and informal lunch-and-learns with other commercial real estate agents with fewer than five years in the business.
One of her short-term goals is to close a really big deal and buy a pearl-white Corvette.
Bhagyesha Darji earned a B.S. in Accounting from The University of Alabama in Birmingham, and is a licensed broker in Alabama. After college she worked in public (tax) accounting and financial planning, and some of the executives at NAI Chase Commercial were her clients. She was recruited in March 2021 to work in the company’s financial administration department.
Reach Bhagyesha Darji: (256) 529 1995
Find out more about NAI Global: www.naiglobal.com