Lee & Associates’ Amy Broadhurst focuses on mentoring younger women in commercial real estate

PITTSBURGH — After growing up and playing soccer in York, Amy Broadhurst first came to Pittsburgh to play the sport at Duquesne University, eventually giving it up to focus on her studies that led to her real estate career with an emphasis on the industrial segment. Her experience interning with Walmart and later working for Prologis resulted in her involvement in western Pennsylvania’s first distribution facility deal in Fairywood and jobs at Hanna Langholz Wilson Ellis and the Pittsburgh office of CBRE. Three years ago, she led the launch of the Pittsburgh office of Lee & Associates, serving as a rare woman leading a commercial real estate firm in Pittsburgh and offering a range of services from industrial and office property to capital markets, among others. Broadhurst recently announced she had reached an agreement with Carrie Holstead of Carrie S. Holstead Real Estate Consultants to take over her various leasing assignments so Holstead could retire. Broadhurst also is working to build her company’s downtown-based office even as she didn’t expect to be managing a staff that now totals six.

In your early career, what was it about industrial specifically that you appreciated more than other kinds of real estate?

I found a love for industrial when I interned at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and I was in the real estate department for a few months, and we went on different site selection trips. Retail was interesting, but Walmart did everything the old school way, so we would literally sit in front of locations and do the traffic counts annually to verify all the information we had, so it was very boring.