Colorado Real Estate Journal - January 6, 2016
Bob Leino always knew he wanted to go into business. “When I was a very small boy, I used to carry my dad’s briefcase around,” the 79-year-old Leino recently recalled. More precisely, he knew what area of business he wanted to specialize in. “I always wanted to sell real estate. I never wanted to do anything else.” He fulfilled his childhood wish. Leino, a senior vice president and principal at Fuller Real Estate, has had a real estate career that spans 56 years. Real estate has always been in his blood. “I’m a third-generation real estate broker,” Leino said. “My son, Chris, (of The Pauls Corp.) is fourth generation,” he said. While his father was the treasurer at the University of Denver, Leino’s alma mater, his mother’s father and his mother were in real estate. “My mother was a pioneer in real estate,” Leino said. “At one point, she had 25 salesmen working for her,” he said. “She operated in the late 1940s through the ’60s, at a time when there weren’t a lot of women in real estate.” After graduating with a real estate degree from DU and being discharged from the Army as an infantry captain, he joined his mother’s firm and sold houses for about three years. Then, he joined the venerable Van Schaack Co. and sold houses for about four years. “I decided what I really wanted to do is sell commercial real estate,” Leino said. “I thought it would be more mentally challenging and exciting,” Leino said. Forty-eight years ago, he joined Fuller and Co. as a real estate broker. “I was salesman No. 12,” Leino said. “They were a very young company at the time.” John Fuller Sr., who founded his namesake firm, Fuller and Co., (the original firm has been sold and renamed) couldn’t say enough good things about Leino. But he tried. “I’ve had the pleasure of calling Bob Leino a friend and Fuller broker for over 35 years,” Fuller said. “In addition to being perhaps the hardest working and smartest broker I’ve ever known, he’s also one of the best people I’ve ever known,” Fuller said. “The old adage of people do business with friends epitomizes Bob as his clients really do like him, and they go out of their way to recommend him to other friends,” Fuller said. “On a side note, one of the more interesting aspects to his career is that he’s always drawn to those deals that nobody else can handle,” Fuller said “We actually joke that he needs to just do some ‘regular’ real estate deals from time-to-time. He recently closed on a land deal in Weld County that was ripe with about every challenge one could encounter. “Eight other people tried to see that deal to the closing table and everyone else failed before Bob saw it to the finish line. “He’s truly amazing broker,” Fuller said. “We’re pleased to have him here at Fuller Real Estate,” where Leino is one of the owners. At Fuller and Co., Leino said he thinks his first “significant” sale was 49 finished residential lots east of Broadway and south of Arapahoe Road. “I don’t remember the price,” he said. For the past 15 years, he primarily has sold dirt. He has sold land for multifamily communities, housing and restaurants. He estimates that has accounted for 80 percent of his business in recent years. When it was pointed out that he has returned to his roots by selling land, he said: “That’s true. I never thought of it that way before.” However, during his career he has done much more than sell land. “During much of my career, I was pretty much a jack of all trades,” Leino said. He has closed more than 1,400 sales and leases. “I’ve sold well over 100 office buildings, shopping centers and apartment projects,” Leino said. “I’ve also sold more than 100 restaurants,” he said. His single-biggest deal in terms of value was a 16,500-square-foot Del Frisco’s Grille lease in the Rockefeller Center in New York City. “My client wanted me to find space in Manhattan,” Leino said. “The Del Frisco’s was the highest-grossing restaurant in New York City for a long time,” he said. During his career, Leino has weathered six downturns. “The worst one might have been the great flood in 1965, when the South Platte overflowed and destroyed thousands of businesses and affected thousands of people,” Leino said. “That was probably the closest Denver has come to a true depression in my lifetime,” he said. “It was very hard to bounce back from.” Although in one way, it helped his business. “It gave me the opportunity to sell a lot of property to people who had lost their businesses,” he said. “But it is very hard to convince people to have the vision to buy during down times,” he said. On a personal level, he was hit hard in 1992. He was forced to declare bankruptcy, following a string of investments he had made in land, offices, apartments and shopping centers from 1975 to 1985. In 1986, Congress changed the rules on write-offs on investment properties, making his holdings less valuable. At the same time, real estate slumped in Denver because of overbuilding and a collapse of oil prices. At the time, Leino was president of Moore Commercial Realty and was forced to resign, so the company could continue to work with the Resolution Trust Corp., the government agency created to deal with the assets from failed saving and loans. “I was in a lot of real estate and it couldn't be turned around, and you couldn’t borrow money on it,” Leino said. He didn’t hide his bankruptcy and didn’t lose clients because of it. "I've been completely up- front and frank with all my business clients, some of whom I've done deals with over the last 30 years," Leino told the Rocky Mountain News in 1992. ''Although the bankruptcy has been very embarrassing for me, all of my clients have been very loving and supportive." He bounced back after a lot of “hard work and prayer,” said Leino, who likes to read Old Testament and New Testament scriptures in his spare time. He remained bullish on Denver real estate, even when he was mired in the bankruptcy. “I never lost faith in real estate,” Leino said. “Never.” When not selling real estate, he serves on the boards of Red Shield and the Salvation Army and is involved with the United Way. For fun, he also goes scuba diving once a year. Even though he has been selling real estate longer than many brokers have been alive, he has no intention of slowing down. “I don’t know how to spell retire,” Leino said. “If you love what you do, it is not work. And I love to sell real estate.”