Retirement in commercial real estate is typically not marked by a last paycheck or a big office party. The commission-only lifestyle that defines this career means it operates differently.
In most cases, simply not renewing your real estate license one year is the only way to punctuate or mark your departure. Like the hero in a Western, you just ride off into the sunset one day.
The real estate license of Tom Hoban, Sr. took that path this year, capping a career that touched many in the region and marked a close to the commercial real estate chapter of his remarkable life.
A sun-tanned and spry 74, he deserves, for perhaps some obvious reasons, the attention not only of this particular columnist but also the attention of anyone associated with the commercial real estate industry locally.
Selected by his peers as the Broker of the Year in 2001, he was one of the first CCIM (Certified Commercial Investment Member) designee’s working in the Everett market. He owned and operated his own firm, Coast Commercial Properties, for 27 years.
He also mentored others who later started their own businesses and successful careers, humbly creating a legacy that is a who’s who of commercial real estate leaders in the region.
But his career in real estate was just a longer-than-usual chapter in a life led with a sense of adventure and a hunger for experiences that, if you dropped by his office to visit or do business with him, you might be privileged to learn a little bit about.
The Korean War was in full swing when he volunteered for the Coast Guard at age 17, kicking off the start of his adventure-seeking life only weeks after he graduated from Seattle Prep High School.
“I wanted to save lives out on the water,” he explained. Most of his four years in the service were spent in the Pacific doing just that. He’d been a dock boy and fishing guide at Coy’s Resort at Mission Beach on Port Susan in the 1940s and a deck hand on a sailing vessel in the San Juan Islands in his youth. Adventure on the water was already part of him.
An assignment in a Coast Guard Headquarters office in New York City near the end of his service put him in close company with the late Alex Haley, also serving duty there, who later wrote the famous book, Roots.
“Alex was a great guy,” he offered. “We used to talk about our days at sea. I had no idea part of the time there he must have spent putting together thoughts for that great book.”
Later in that same year, his mother was watching a nationally broadcast beauty contest on television. The top five contestants were escorted by a member of each branch of the armed forces in full dress uniform. To her surprise, her son was one of them.
“I was Mr. Coast Guard”, he explained. “You should have seen Mr. Marine. He was put together like a brick house,” underselling his own lanky good looks that won him the slot.
Later, during his college years, he took on summer beach jobs in Hawaii secured through relationships he forged with local shipmates years earlier.
“Not many haoli (Caucasian) boys were surfing in Hawaii then. You had to know guys. I became good enough to compete in The Internationals.”
That’s where he met Elvis, Debbie Reynolds, and other Hollywood stars who frequented his section of Waikiki Beach, where he was busy giving surfing lessons, renting boards and taking tourists out on bare boat tours. “I think I was taller than Elvis” was about as far as that story ever went. “I was more interested in making a buck and meeting girls.”
Another adventure found him working alone as an armed stream guard on a remote Alaskan peninsula where he was attacked by a brown bear.
“The bear died almost on top of me as he crashed through my cabin door during the attack,” he somberly recalled. “Ten feet tall and 1,500 pounds of angry Alaskan Brown Bear laying on me and my busted camp in the open tundra. It was a mess. My rifle saved my life that day. I still shiver when I think about it.”
The situation was even more dire than that.
“My radio went out, I was alone, the supplies plane dropped my supplies into the river, and there wasn’t another human being for a hundred miles. After the attack, I realized I had to eat him or starve to death … and just three weeks later I’m walking the halls at Notre Dame as a student, wearing my cardigan sweater, just like nothing had happened.”
Then there are his story about alligator hunting in the swamps of Florida, surviving a boat accident in the chilly Bering Sea, avoiding sharks as a rescue swimmer, diving off the super structure of ships in the South Pacific, running down a peeping tom spying on his kids; some rough and tumble moments, some tender ones, and some stories he keeps just to himself.
On the peeping tom, he quipped:
“Guys wore long hair in the 1970s. I caught that peeping tom in full stride in our front yard by his golden locks. I think he lost some of it in our tussle. He didn’t peep into our windows ever again.”
He brought that sense of adventure into his real estate career as well. A local Native American tribe once asked him to quietly help them buy a culturally significant island in Puget Sound. On hand shakes, he put the deal together.
He earned a sales commission, of course, and something unusual: A Pendleton blanket.
“For this particular tribe, the gift of a blanket was a bigger deal than the commission. It’s something they only give to a very few non-tribal members. I was honored,” he recalled.
In a style that was uniquely his ,forged from his modest Irish Catholic upbringing, he built relationships in his career like the relationships he built throughout his life, many of which are lifetime bonds rarely linked to whether there was a sales commission involved.
“If I leave every chapter of my life a little better than when I started it, then I guess that’s good enough,” he said reflectively.
That was as close to advice-giving as he ever got with this two sons and daughter. That wasn’t how he communicated to his kids. Watching and admiring this man was usually enough for us.
Within months of his retirement from real estate, he jumped into volunteering for an organization dedicated to improving the health of our Puget Sound waters, beaches and estuaries — a passion inspired by living in recent years on the same beach where he pulled in trophy-sized salmon as a barefoot kid.
His passion for the waters of the Northwest was shared by his wife of 48 years, Maureen, whom he describes as “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
His no-nonsense approach to things, coupled with a marvelous gift as a communicator and connector of people, fit well into this new endeavor. “Tom knows everybody” offered a fellow board member. And so, another new adventure begins.
So, to you, Dad, we lift up a toast and say thanks. The community lifts up a toast to the great ambassador, the real estate version of the Western movie hero who he rides off into the sunset. The shipmate and surfer his Hawaiian friends called “Our John Wayne.”
We thank you for setting an example of what a businessman ought to be and how life is supposed to be lived, chapter by chapter, adventure by adventure. For your giving to others who found some inspiration from you whether they were your own or not. For putting being a family man above all else and suspending your own adventurous nature to ensure a good outcome with Mom and we three siblings.
And, for showing us all that the book of life is always unfinished and the life well lived is one where as quickly as we finish one chapter, we turn the page to start another, looking back only to measure whether we have left everyone we touched a little better off for our having been here.
Tom Hoban is co-owner of the Everett-based Coast group of commercial real estate companies, specializing in commercial real estate management, sales, leasing and investment. He can be reached at tomhoban@coastmgt.com, 425-339-3638 or www.coastsvn.com.
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