Professional Profile: Bransom Bean - 1980

Name: Bransom Bean - 1980

Title: Broker

Company: Norwood Group

Location: Manchester, NH

Birthplace: -

Bransom Bean, 27, didn’t leave the Navy because he didn’t like it. In fact, he loved the Navy – visiting foreign ports of call and arranging supply drops by helicopter. He left after deciding that it would be hard to make his first million dollars by age 35 as a naval supply officer. So he joined the Norwood Group Commercial/Industrial/Investment Division in late 1978 and at the rate he’s gong he may be a millionaire before he’s 35! In 1979, his first full year in real estate sales, Bean was the Norwood Group’s top producer with close to $10 million in sales. His transactions included the Mount St. Mary’s College campus, the former Franklin Pierce Law Center campus and a three-way transaction with Hendrix Electronics which involved the sale of its 83,000 sq. ft. Harvey road plant to Computervision and a 15-year lease of the 300,000 sq. ft. Jefferson Mill Building in Manchester’s millyard area. Asked how he developed these large opportunities, Bean modestly insists that “the Lord had an awful lot to do with it. I seemed to be in the right place at the right time. And frankly, I often do well with properties no one else wants to handle. College campuses are often thought of as white elephants with limited market appeal. Obviously for me they were a gold mine.” Bransom’s colleagues would disagree, however, that his success is largely luck. He has a reputation as a tenacious, persistent, 60 hour a week worker. “It’s true,” Bean admits, “that a potential buyer doesn’t walk away from me easily. I just don’t let go of a viable prospect. I’ll keep working to hammer out the right deal to satisfy both parties.” He views every listing as a moral commitment to sell his client’s property. “I can’t stop running and sweating over it until it’s sold.” As for the long hours, Bransom considers his 12-hour days a “luxury of being single. I spend my days on the road meeting with people and knocking on doors. Then when everyone else has left the office I turn my own music up loud and have a good time with my paperwork.” Actually, Bransom doesn’t think he has enough work to do. “I want another, different challenge to spend my weekends and late night time on. I’m looking for the right company to buy and manage.” “I’ve got to put my money to work in a variety of investments to meet my long range financial plan,” he explains. His plan? A net worth of $50 million at age 40 with a comfortable income of $5 million or so a year. He’s mapped out around-the-world sailing trips, journalistic expeditions for National Geographic and archaeological digs in Africa. He also wants a few basic toys – a Lear jet (he is a private pilot and owns a small plane with 11 others in a Laconia-based flying club) and a 50-foot boat for long cruises. Except for one luxury, a new Mercedes Benz that just arrived from Germany, Bean presently leads a very frugal life, saving and investing his earnings with a single-minded sense of purpose. Asked how he likes his burgeoning real estate career, Bean states “It’s frustrating much of the time. There’s no reason why so many transactions have to take so long to close. I work hard to put together the right package from the start; most of the delays are useless game playing. I crave adventure, excitement, action.” If $10,000,000 in sales in his first year isn’t action, we wonder what Bean will do to the real estate world in the 1980s.