Brandon Yuke has joined Proveras Commercial Realty as a principal, the firm announced this week.
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One of Ottawa’s leading independent commercial real estate brokerages has added a rising industry executive to its ranks.
Brandon Yuke has joined Proveras Commercial Realty as a principal, the firm announced this week.
The 35-year-old Ottawa native spent the past seven years as an executive at CBRE’s Ottawa office, graduating from senior sales associate to associate vice-president and most recently vice-president, a role he held for the past nine months.
Yuke moves from one of the country’s largest full-service real estate organizations to a boutique firm that specializes in representing tenants and owner-users of commercial space. While Proveras is a smaller operation than CBRE, Yuke said the chance to help grow the company’s book of business as a partner was too good to pass up.
“Five years from now, if I hadn’t taken it, I would probably be like, ‘I wish I had at least tried out this entrepreneurial side of commercial real estate brokerage,’” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
Yuke earned a bachelor of arts degree from Carleton University before beginning his commercial real estate career as a sales trainee at CBRE in 2011. He later spent three years as a leasing representative at property management firm Bentall Kennedy (now QuadReal) before returning to CBRE in 2017.
The man who hired him back at CBRE, Shawn Hamilton, is now one of his business partners at Proveras.
While acknowledging that leaving the firm where he “grew up” was “bittersweet,” Yuke said his bond with Hamilton as well as his respect for fellow Proveras principals Nick Maiorino and Alan Doak cinched his decision to make the leap.
“Shawn’s always been a mentor of mine,” he said. “There were all-around good vibes in terms of the people who were here already.”
Hamilton said his new partner’s “remarkable ability to connect with people” has fuelled his ascent because it allows him to “identify with business owners and decision-makers.”
Yuke said he hopes to keep building on his experience representing office tenants in the downtown core and the Kanata tech park while also looking to expand the firm’s client base in the east end.
Although the office market remains in a state of flux following the widespread shift to hybrid work during the pandemic, vacancy rates have begun to stabilize over the past few quarters.
Yuke said companies are starting to get a better feel for their long-term real estate needs – and that’s sparking demand for higher-end space with amenities that can lure workers back to the office.
“Most tenants now are pretty dialled in in the sense that they know what they want,” he explained.
“You could almost say there’s a micro-competition for the best class-A space in Ottawa right now. Whereas if you look at the … overall vacant space inventory in Ottawa, there’s a lot of it.”
