CRE Adrenaline Junkies

Sometimes a round on the golf course just isn’t gonna cut it. We rounded up six commercial real estate pros who love extreme sports (and make us feel a little lame).

Many thanks to CBRE’s Peter Mainguy for suggesting the topic. The surf enthusiast went to UC Berkeley, but didn’t pick up the sport until moving back to wave-deprived Texas. Charter Title’s Cameron Franz (whom Peter met while they were at McDade Smith) got him into it, and they still surf together. Sunday, they went to Matagorda, one of Peter’s favorite Texas surf locations. The photo above was taken in Nicaragua in 2012, a trip he took with Cameron and NewQuest’s Danny McCormack. It was particularly memorable—he met his now-fiancée there (she was on a yoga retreat with fellow nurses).

Transwestern managing director Justin Leighton just completed the CTS bucket list trip, an amateur version of the Amgen Tour of California—an eight-day, 720-mile course. (Pictured, center, he’s at the top of Mount Diablo after riding 111 miles in one day for that event.) Justin races competitively and has reached Category 1, meaning he gets to race with the pros in all non-invite events. He also does endurance mountain trek bicycle races; last year, he did the Leadville 100, a 111-mile race that goes up to 13,000 feet of elevation. (It’s mostly done by people who live at high altitude, but he finished in the top group.) We think it all pales in comparison to Justin’s even more impressive extreme sport—raising 8-year-old triplets and a six-month old.

JLL EVP Holly Minter and her family traveled to Africa for missionary work and took a week before to experience the continent. That included bungee jumping off the Victoria Falls Bridge, half of which is in Zambia and half in Zimbabwe. 

Not a bad view to go hurtling past.

JLL VP Chris Dekker loves extreme skiing, like this trip he did with his uncle. The duo took the Aguille du Midi (the highest vertical cable car ascent in the world) and snapped this photo to show just how vertical their ride down would be. Once their skis were on, they headed down Valee Blanche, a 10-plus mile dog leg left 9,000 vertical feet to the bottom. He said the crazy slopes were “gnarly, nasty stuff,” but he LOVED IT!

Kirksey’s Corvin Alstot has been competitively cycling, on- and off-road, for over 25 years, but experience doesn't make him injury-proof. Last weekend, just after beginning a race, his handlebars hit the side of a tree on a particularly narrow part of the path and he sailed into the air, landed on a rock, and sliced open his forearm. After analyzing the situation he determined that it wasn’t too bad (we saw the pic… it was bad) and biked for another hour and a half. Upon finishing the race he immediately rushed to an urgent care center and needed eight stitches to close the wound. Now that is dedication!

Integra Realty Resources’ Elizabeth Sekaly is another bungee-jump enthusiast. Here, she’s jumping off the third-tallest bungee jumping bridge in the world. It’s called the Europe Bridge in Innsbruck, Austria, and the plummet down is 630 feet.

We've got another installment of extreme sports all lined up. Do you belong in it? Tell Catie Dixon, [email protected].