After 67 Years and 10,000 Deals, Broker Hearn Hangs Up Hat

The way Frederick “Skip” Hearn figures it, he’s been involved in more than 10,000 transactions during his 67-year career as a commercial real estate broker.
Now, at 87, Hearn says it’s time to hang up his hat for good and retire. “There is nothing really left for me to accomplish,” Hearn, a senior vice president of MacKenzie Commercial, said in an email. He works in the brokerage’s Lutherville, Maryland, office.
His final day as a broker is expected to be Wednesday.
When Hearn started his commercial real estate career in the mid-1950s, there were no computers or online data services to help him find office space for his clients. Instead, Hearn did it the old-fashioned way, searching through a broker book where available spaces had been entered manually.
“Computers obviously didn’t exist and I still hate using them now, so all of the commercial office listings were written down,” he said. “So, if a company was looking for 3,000 square feet of space, it was a painstaking process to sift through our rudimentary system of files before presenting them to the end-user.”
Hearn, who averaged about 200 deals a year at the peak of his career, said the key to his longevity was “representing a lot of different building owners, many of which were small projects. My philosophy of hitting singles and doubles would typically generate 10 to 20 different leases at the same building. I built my career that way and ultimately sold most of the buildings.”