For real estate adviser, motivation comes between buying and selling

By Richard Mize

Published: July 6, 2008

It's not the chase — landing a listing can be the easiest part of being a real estate agent.

It's not the closing — completing a sale can be anticlimactic, although it is a payday.

It's the stuff in between that excites and inspires Jason Little, a senior adviser with Sperry Van Ness commercial real estate advisers in Oklahoma City.

At 26, he already is a well-established veteran of commercial property brokerage and real estate investment. Since joining Sperry Van Ness in October 2004, he's exceeded $165 million in sales volume.

But he didn't start out with high-profile sales like First National Center, the 1-million-square-foot office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, which he handled for the present owners in an unusually fast $21 million cash deal in May 2006.

Or Midwest City's Heritage Park Mall, which he handled both coming and going — representing a buyer who paid $4.1 million for the mall in December 2004, then helping him sell it for $7.8 million just a few months later.

Those are a couple of his proudest professional accomplishments — along with being named Rookie of the Year in 2005 by Irvine, Calif.-based Sperry Van Ness, and his receipt of Sperry Van Ness's Partner's Circle Award each of his three years with the firm, which means he brought in at least $700,000 in gross commissions per year for the Oklahoma City office.

But what drives him is the grunt work, say, helping an investor acquire, then update, an outdated building, land some tenants, increase income stream — then sell at a hefty profit. That approach worked for him. He strives to make it work for his clients. It started when he was still a teenager.

At 19, Little said he "scraped up what little money I had and started buying single-family properties.” He was in college, but close to graduating, studying international business at the University of Central Oklahoma, in Edmond. He earned his bachelor's degree at 20.

Then he and some investment partners bought a vacant commercial property, a 3,864-square-foot building constructed in 1919 in downtown Oklahoma City. They paid $125,000 for the building, at 434 W Main Street, in December 2003, landed a tenant and sold it three years later for $400,000.

"I thought, ‘This seems to be working. I'd like to become involved with much bigger projects,” Little said.

In fact, that first commercial investment set the tone for his career.

"What excites me now is the same thing that excited me when I was 19: It's finding ways to add value to a real asset. It's a tangible asset that's real,” he said. It allows him to use the same principles that got him on his own way to generate "millions and millions and millions of dollars for clients.”

It might seem far from his first experiences in sales, but it's not really.

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