For Barbara LeBrun, it turns out you can go home again.

Barbara has returned to the firm that made her career, NAI/Merin Hunter Codman, as managing director, teaming back up with her longtime friend and mentor, Neil Merin. Barbara returns to the firm from KW Commercial, which she joined in 2013 after 28 years with NAI/Merin Hunter Codman.

Barbara credits the “Hand of God” as the reason she's in the CRE biz. At first, her idea was simply to work retail following college, but that kind of schedule was dismaying.

“I was very young,” she recalls. "I was in my 20s, I was in party mode, and I didn't want to work nights and weekends."

Dabbling as a receptionist for a condo developer, Barbara began to get a taste of sales, cultivating prospects for the condo sales team. Then a job opened up as Neil's executive secretary.

That's where she gleaned knowledge on the brokerage business, working under him for a number of years.

“It was largely he who pushed me into the brokerage side, because I was not anxious to give up a salary and go into commission,” she says. “And he was right. I had many, many six-figure years while I was there. He knew better than I did. Other people can sometimes see things in you better than [you] can.”

Barbara, a founding member and immediate past president of CREW Palm Beach, has aided companies such as JPMorgan Chase, TA Realty and the American Red Cross during her career.

And she has high hopes for 2017's South Florida office market, especially under a Trump administration. What she sees as having been a jobless recovery with many low-wage positions could see the floodgates of office hiring, especially if the tide of outsourcing to foreign countries reverses.