About Greg Cooper

Start with strategy

Every assignment starts the same way: a strategic conversation. Before we look at a single building, I want to know where your business or your portfolio needs to be in 5 and 10 years.

Most business owners plan around the space they need today. That makes sense. They're handling immediate problems, and sometimes the immediate problem is space. But when a company outgrows its space too fast, it ends up squeezing more people into too little room, or moving before it's ready for the next space. I call planning around where the business is going "futurecasting," and it's the first thing we do together.

Investors get the same approach. Whether you're buying, selling or coming out of a 1031 exchange and want safer, more reliable cash flow, the real estate has to serve the larger plan.

How I got here

I went to the University of Texas School of Law to learn contracts and real estate law. During law school, some friends and I started Austin Java. By the time I graduated, we had five restaurants and 200 employees.

Real estate was always my passion. In 2005 I joined the Goldwasser team at Keller Williams, which grew into the #1 Keller Williams team worldwide by sales volume in 2007 and 2008. We then launched Goldwasser Real Estate as its own brokerage, with me as CEO, and sold it to Bradfield Properties, where I served as senior vice president.

My business background and legal training kept pulling me into commercial deals, and that side of my business kept growing. After the sale, I focused on commercial and development work. I later served as President of Offerd, where I built and managed a 30-person team sourcing and executing institutional transactions across multiple asset classes. Today I'm a Broker Associate with Kuper Sotheby's International Realty in Austin.

What I do today

Why the law degree matters

My J.D. from the University of Texas shapes how I handle every contract and every negotiation, from the first letter of intent to the final signature.

Real estate deals are made of contract terms. A purchase contract, a lease or an option agreement decides who carries the risk, who pays for what, what happens when something goes wrong and how you get out if you need to. Most of those terms are settled long before anyone reads the final draft. The deal is made before the lease is ever drafted, so I negotiate the terms that matter while you still have leverage.

Legal training changes how I read a deal. I look at how a contingency, a deadline, a guarantee, an assignment clause or a default provision will play out months or years from now, and I negotiate with that in mind. Price matters, but so do due diligence periods, financing and title conditions, repair and maintenance obligations, renewal and expansion rights, and the remedies on both sides if someone doesn't perform.

It also makes me a better partner to your attorney. I'm not your lawyer, and I'll always want your own legal counsel to review your documents. But your attorney starts that review from a deal that's already structured to protect you.