Jon Silberman taps a pen against a marble conference table while his executives talk. There is a drummer’s rhythm to the habit, and a chief executive’s interest in getting through the agenda. It is a small, rather pleasing collision: the meeting has its business, and the pen has its own.
At Partners, the Houston commercial real estate firm he helped launch in 1997, Silberman has spent years enlarging the agenda. A business that began by finding office space for tenants now spans services, investment management and development. His present job includes deciding which people, markets and capabilities belong together. The office lease has acquired quite an extended family.
The company’s name carries his central proposition. Producers can become owners. The people bringing in clients and creating value can participate in the business they are helping to build. For a broker choosing where to spend a career, that makes the conversation considerably more interesting than the next commission split.
An engineer takes a part-time job
Silberman graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in electrical and computer engineering. He also earned an MBA at the University of Houston in 1987. The combination gives his career an unusual starting point: technical training followed by business education, before years spent working through the practical details of space, money and negotiation.
His arrival in property was unceremonious. A part-time job at a predecessor of NAI Houston caught his interest, although real estate had held little appeal beforehand. By 2013 he was describing a career spent with the same evolving business through acquisitions and changes of name. He had also pursued technology ventures, including Swift Lease, designed to help smaller office tenants find space.
There was another journey before that one. Born in South Africa, he moved to Houston at 12 and continued playing cricket into adulthood. The city became the setting for his education, work and family. His professional history has the continuity of someone who stayed, even while the business around him kept changing.
A lease with rather a lot inside it
The TGS-Nopec assignments show the substance beneath the corporate titles. In January 2013, Crimson Real Estate Fund and USAA Real Estate Company announced an approximately 97,500-square-foot North American headquarters for the geophysical data company. Silberman represented TGS. The plan called for a three-story building on eight acres on Clay Road, with room for the occupier to grow.
That September, Silberman and Griff Bandy represented TGS-Nopec in a separate 45,000-square-foot build-to-suit data-center lease with Digital Realty. The facility formed part of a planned 300,000-square-foot data-center development in Houston. Here was an assignment with an obvious technical dimension: a company dealing in data needed the physical infrastructure to house its work.
The pairing is instructive. Office accommodation and computing infrastructure serve the same client but ask different questions of the broker. A headquarters must suit the organization using it; a data center adds another set of requirements. In both transactions, Silberman sat on the tenant’s side, helping translate an operating need into a property agreement.
The relationship continued. In 2020 he negotiated TGS-Nopec’s renewal for the entire 97,295-square-foot building at 10451 Clay Road. Seven years after the original headquarters announcement, the work included keeping the occupier in place. Commercial property careers are often narrated through new addresses. A renewal provides a quieter measure: the client returns to the table.
The producer becomes a builder of the firm
His own production remained measurable while the management responsibilities grew. For 2014, his deal tally was 40 transactions, covering 424,000 square feet and $62 million. One assignment involved Pacific Drilling Services, which doubled its footprint to 77,000 square feet while relocating from the Galleria to the Energy Corridor.
Working with Bandy, Silberman also secured improved signage and visibility for that client. Those details are less grand than a skyline photograph, and more useful to the person signing a lease. A building may look handsome from a helicopter; a business still needs customers and visitors to recognize it from the road.
Today, Silberman is Partners’ CEO and largest shareholder. His transaction experience exceeds 20 million square feet over more than three decades. Tenant representation and corporate services remain his client specialties, even as the firm’s scope has broadened. The negotiator has acquired a second kind of construction project: assembling the organization around the deals.
His engineering education belongs in that picture without needing to explain every decision he makes. The transactions themselves show a concern with how separate requirements fit together. The business now presents a similar challenge on a larger scale: coordinating people whose expertise covers different parts of a property’s life.
An ownership proposition with consequences
In March 2024, explaining the Southeast expansion, Silberman put the structure plainly: “We are a true partnership where our colleagues have ownership in the firm.” He compared it with the partnership arrangements familiar in accounting, consulting and law. The point was to make collaboration economically meaningful to the people doing the work.
Partners’ recruiting proposition spells out several routes beyond a commission: company ownership, opportunities to invest, and participation in carried interest. Its partnership materials also describe profit distributions, appreciation in share value and participation in company decisions. These are distinct benefits, and their appeal depends on a professional’s appetite for building a longer association with the firm.
That approach gives Silberman a specific argument when recruiting experienced brokers. Joining can mean taking part in a business with several sources of activity, rather than attaching a personal book of clients to an office address. Services, investments and development give the partnership different ways to work with occupiers and property owners.
There is a cultural filter, too. When Jeremy Brubaker joined the Dallas office as a partner in May 2024, Silberman described the strategic plan as calling for “growth in the right ways.” Talent and fit both mattered in his explanation. A partnership has to choose the people who will share its decisions as carefully as those who will share its stationery.
“Work Together, Win Together.”Partners’ motto, used by Jon Silberman · March 2024
Texas was becoming a starting point
Partners ended its NAI Global affiliation in 2022, after a 25-year association, and adopted the shorter name. The change made independence an explicit part of its public identity. By 2023, it was operating across Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas. Leaving a network made the question of what came next especially concrete.
The answer arrived in Atlanta. Partners opened there on June 1, 2024, its first expansion outside Texas. John O’Neill became president and managing partner for the Southeast and a board member. He brought two decades of experience at Cushman & Wakefield, including regional and national leadership responsibilities.
Atlanta supplied a base for a wider Southeast ambition that included the Carolinas, Nashville and Florida. For Silberman, the move meant entrusting the partnership model to a senior executive who would build it in a new region. An expansion announcement can be written in an afternoon; a functioning office requires people who can keep its promises.
Texas received another senior appointment in December 2025. Peter Mainguy joined as an equity partner and executive managing director of services for the region, after serving as CBRE’s Houston and Louisiana market leader. His remit covered brokerage, property management, valuation and advisory, and project management. O’Neill and Mainguy gave the growing business regional leadership with substantial operating experience.
- 1997Partners Commercial Realty launches in Houston.
- 2022The NAI affiliation ends; Partners becomes the name.
- 2024Atlanta opens, the first office outside Texas.
- 2026A Raleigh-based leader joins to run occupier growth and development.
Four disciplines, one assignment
The next development sharpened Silberman’s argument about coordination. In September 2026, Partners appointed Bryan Dodge to lead a new Occupier Growth & Development offering. Dodge, formerly Floor & Decor’s chief real estate and business development officer, would be based in Raleigh and report to Silberman.
The offering brings together strategic planning, site selection, development and build-out, and ongoing property management. It addresses an everyday inconvenience that becomes expensive as a company expands: separate firms working on separate portions of the same opening. Silberman described clients’ reluctance to employ four firms and then manage the handoffs themselves.
The proposal gives his growth strategy a practical test. Can a firm that has added services and regions make an assignment easier for the occupier? The new practice is designed around a single point of contact across those stages. Its usefulness will be felt in the joins: where a site decision becomes a building project, and a finished building becomes an operating location.
For Silberman, the connection to tenant representation is direct. The client still has a business to run and a property problem to solve. The assignment now stretches further along the process, requiring more of the firm around the broker.
A little rhythm beyond the square footage
The business has accumulated public recognition along the way. Partners ranked first in the Houston Business Journal’s large-company Best Places to Work category in 2023. Silberman himself was named a 2025 Most Admired CEO honoree by the same publication. The distinctions recognize different things: the experience of working inside the organization, and the person responsible for leading it.
Outside the office, his interests have ranged well beyond property. In 2013 he had learned to fly, played drums in a band and owned horses. He spoke then of wanting an extended flying trip through South America or Asia. That was a stated ambition at the time, an itinerary with rather more romance than a tour of available office suites.
The pen at the conference table is a smaller expression of that musical side. It also suits a career spent balancing the individual producer with the collective enterprise. Silberman’s continuing project is to make room for both: capable people doing their own work, with a financial reason to care how the whole firm performs.
Partners has carried that proposition from Houston tenant assignments into a business operating across several markets and disciplines. The next chapter depends on whether the enlarged organization keeps the appeal that made the original partnership worth joining. A share in the business is a persuasive invitation. It also gives the recipient every reason to pay attention at the next meeting.