Print edition: 
Herb Krumsick grew up poor in Pittsburg and decided he wanted something more out of life.
That’s where the career of the Wichita commercial real estate professor began, a career that will be honored today by the Kansas Certified Commercial Investment Member chapter, which will present its lifetime achievement award at a noon luncheon at Wichita State University’s Marcus Welcome Center.
Krumsick joins past lifetime achievement award recipients like his bosses Nestor and Mike Weigand, George Ablah, Colby Sandlian, Steve Clark, Jack DeBoer and the late Jack Hunt.
Krumsick has done it all in the commercial real estate industry – more than $1 billion in deals while also becoming one of the nation’s foremost commercial real estate instructors.
The self-proclaimed “three-time All American” at WSU professes to be embarrassed by the attention. “Oh, no,” he replied to a request for this interview.
But when you get Krumsick, 67, rolling – something that’s not difficult to do – today’s luncheon is “a really big honor,” he admits.
“Sure wasn’t anything I was expecting,” Krumsick said. “I was really pleased, really kind of surprised.”
His fellow members of CCIM weren’t.
“Herb’s been a major figure in our community, our region and the nation,” said David Leyh, a Wichita commercial broker. “He’s carried the pin (the CCIM designation) for multiple years, and he’s used it in his transactions. He’s told many clients to buy things and many clients not to buy things based on the knowledge he’s learned.”
“Herb is an award-winning speaker for SIOR (the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors), and he is better known, probably, around the country in the real estate world than he is in Wichita,” said Mike Loveland, a commercial broker and developer with Weigand. “Everywhere I go in this industry, if I mention I’m from Wichita, people ask me if I know Herb Krumsick.
“If you’ve ever met Herb Krumsick, you’re never going to forget him.”
Leaving poverty behind
Krumsick points no fingers about his upbringing.
“Everybody grew up poor in the 1950s and 1960s,” he said. “Everybody had a motivation to do something different and our family was the same way in Pittsburg.
“You grow up poor, and that’s your motivation to do better. In those days, there’s so much opportunity and if you just believe in it and work hard, you can get the thing done.”
Football at WSU was a brief interruption in Krumsick’s real estate career, with teammates like Bill Parcells making a big impression on him. There’s a good slice of football’s “team-first” mentality in Krumsick’s approach to commercial real estate.
“I read a book back then that said that 60 percent of millionaires in America made their money in real estate,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”
But Krumsick rejects any notion that commercial real estate success requires any level of genius.
“Money is situational,” he said. “In the right situation and at the right time, you can make money. I didn’t do any of this.
“It’s the right situation at the right time, and that applies today to oil, high tech, gold. It keeps moving around.”
If you keep pushing, though, you discover that Krumsick’s innate knowledge of the commercial real estate industry drives his success, all the self-deprecation aside. To wit:
“Here’s the deal: Everybody was making so much money in real estate and no one knew why,” he said. “You couldn’t succinctly explain it.”
Then, he morphs immediately into the real estate professor.
“You had growing inflation causing appreciation, and everyone looking at deals like a stock with a dividend,” Krumsick said, succinctly.
“It was like buying a dividend stock where you were getting your value from the appreciation.”
Krumsick has a lot of real estate credits on his resume, but he cites his first big sale as a broker, Normandie Shopping Center near Central and Woodlawn, as his favorite deal.
And his proudest real estate possession is the Flint Oak Ranch, a private sporting preserve in Elk County in which he shares an ownership interest.
Learning from CCIM
Real estate knowledge, Krumsick said, came from his classes and from networking at the state and local CCIM level. The CCIM designation, a graduate form of commercial real estate education, is considered the doctorate of the industry, Leyh said.
“What the classes teach you is that real estate has four yields: cash flow, tax shelter, mortgage reduction and appreciation,” he said. “Quite frankly, for many years, appreciation was your best yield and nobody knew how to quantify it. You were just riding the wave, and the CCIM courses taught me how to quantify these identifiable yields and put them into an understandable fashion.”
“CCIM has two functions – education and life after the pin,” Loveland said. “Life after the pin is the networking and the technology. And from the education you develop skills in sales and marketing and analysis of real estate.”
Those analytical tools and technology are invaluable in good real estate decisions, Leyh said.
“It’s quantitative, and if you use those tools to build a decision parameter that’s professional, not just gut instinct,” he said.
That kind of knowledge made it easy for Krumsick to step behind the podium as an instructor for the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors, traveling the country – often at his own expense – for four decades.
“I’ve taught for two reasons,” Krumsick said. “One, it’s fun to share with other people. Two, I’ve found that any time you give, you get back as much or more than you give.
“Having taught through these 40 years, the thing it does is it keeps you sharp and up to date on the market.”
