SITUS KEEPS JOBS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA


Posted January 28, 2017 by mediagg

Situs, a global leader in Commercial Real Estate, is doing its part to keep jobs in the U.S.

 
On Monday, we celebrate our Ten-Year Anniversary at Situs’ Robbins, North Carolina rural operations center where digital jobs have been created in a shuttered sock factory, to bring employment to small-town America, a pledge President Donald Trump has vowed to accomplish.


Situs Executive Managing Director Steven Bean, who grew up in Robbins, NC, brought prosperity back and will lead the festivities.


“We are very excited; it’s all about our people and the community — giving everybody the opportunity to participate in the global workplace,” says Situs’ Bean. “The fact that we were able to turn around a bleak situation there — mills and clothing factories shut-down and jobs moved overseas — into giving our team job opportunities that aren’t readily available in rural America; you can’t beat that. Today, the Robbins office is our largest office, with nearly 100 employees. We have goals to grow it even more.”


Robbins was like hundreds of other mill towns across the Southeast. As closing textile and apparel plants across the region drained the lifeblood from these areas, residents were challenged to reinvent themselves and communities have struggled.


Bean saw the problem first-hand as his family stayed behind in Robbins. “I wanted to pay back the community that nurtured me,” says Bean. “I’ve managed both on-shore and off-shore operations, and understand the cost-benefit analysis of each— what each location does well and what they don’t do well.”


He says it wasn’t easy but, “I realized that if I came from Robbins and could succeed in this business, then obviously we could train others there to be CRE experts. For our team in Robbins, there was absolutely a role and place in the global marketplace to perform very high-quality tasks, at a very cost-effective price.”


So Situs not only created the Robbins facility but worked with local schools and businesses. “We fed the local colleges where we helped them create a commercial real estate curriculum and led a group including local banks, insurance companies and others to get behind the effort to build up Robbins,” he adds.


Bean has this advice for other U.S. corporations: “What they are leaving behind and forgetting is their community, and to me corporate America is too much about the numbers and metrics that you are measured by and nobody asks what you have done for your community and the future leaders of our country… you need to pay it forward!”


Some would say that what happened in Robbins was divine intervention, says Situs CEO Steve Powel. “Situs, by way of its mortgage loan servicing business, was a large depositor in Wells Fargo Bank. Because of our large escrow balances retained at the bank, I had the fortune a few years earlier of meeting John Stumps, then President and COO of the Bank. Situs had also been working on a Master Services Agreement for some 14 months, with little forward progress. This agreement was the make it or break it for Robbins at the time. So Steven Bean and I put our heads together and I decided it was time to pay Mr. Stumps a visit. My sole objective of this visit was to ask him how important our few hundred million dollars in deposits were to the Bank.”


Situs’ Powel adds, “All I can say is that, within 30 days of the visit with Mr. Stumps, Situs Robbins’ Outsourcing Solutions had its signed Master Services Agreement. This was extremely important for our operations because it was in 2008, when the market was in the early stages of the Great Recession. Over the next three years, Situs Outsourcing Solutions was one of Wells Fargo’s highest volume vendors to their commercial mortgage servicing operation. Today, Situs Outsourcing Solutions serves some of the largest financial institutions and mortgage companies in the world, to include the U.S. Government-sponsored multifamily lenders (Fannie, Freddie and HUD). I am very proud of our team in Robbins, and especially thankful for my business partner, Steven Bean and Wells Fargo.”


As Paul Harvey would close, “…and that is the Rest of the Story!”

For more information, visit http://www.situs.com
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Issued By support
Website situs
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Categories News
Tags leadership , real estate , situs
Last Updated January 31, 2017