Keith joined the Doug Mayberry team with a comprehensive background in Commercial Real Estate (CRE) and provides expert assistance in the commercial market, which includes retail, restaurants, business ownership, office, industrial, and income-producing residential of greater than four units.
A resident of Key West since early 1994, Keith owns a home in the Casa Marina district that also houses his art studio. He is an accomplished artist, a painter (in oil), a photographer, and the recent author of a coffee-table book featuring his one-year-cycle series of photographs of brilliant color and form in the Key West twilight sky. He is also a nationally-known portrait painter, specializing in three-feet-square canvases that feature the realistic and candid faces of children. His more than 20-year body of work is very diverse but consistently inspired by intense light and color and by natural and organic forms. Log on to www.KeithBland.com to view his art.
Keith received a BBA in Finance from Baylor University and a Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in New York City. At Columbia he studied development with an emphasis on American architectural history and preservation. The intense natural light and color and the rich architectural stock of Key West were the two main attractions that brought Keith to Key West.
Post-college, Keith began his diverse commercial real estate career in the early 1980s, completing First City National Bank of Houston's Professional Bank Training Program, became an Assistant Vice President in the CRE Department, and was published in Texas Banker Magazine. From there he moved back to his hometown of Memphis where he worked as an executive officer for Boyle Investment Company, a large, successful and influential regional developer in the Mid-South. After being given an opportunity to return to New York and work on Wall Street, he accepted a Vice President position at Matthews & Wright, a boutique firm, investing in CRE nationally.
It was in New York that Keith made a decision to pursue his art on a full-time basis, when in 2005, a good friend who owns SC Advisors, a brokerage/advisory firm in Orlando, convinced him to return to his CRE roots to attempt to balance the art and brokerage. Based in Orlando, and commuting from Key West every other week, Keith headed up the brokerage department, representing many influential clients, one of which was a large Florida-based regional bank that Keith brokered purchases and/or leases for and obtained over 20 new sites throughout the state.
In 2009, after the "great recession" hit the state's economy, Keith decided that with the slowdown he had an opportunity for his commuting days to cease and desist and arranged a partnership with Doug Mayberry. Doug and I are looking forward to the continued resurgence of the commercial markets and stand ready to grow
Keith serves on the Board of Directors of Leadership Monroe County and on the Advisory Board of the Florida Keys Council of the Arts. In the past he has served on the Vestry of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, and been a Literacy and Hospice volunteer
