Combining real estate and beer may sound like an unusual combination, but it partially describes the career of colorful Hawaiʻi executive Steve Sombrero, who was recently honored by the University of Hawaiʻi’s Shidler College of Business. He’s someone who used a particular skill to launch an entrepreneurial career across continents.
Sombrero grew up on Guam and started his career there as an entrepreneur, working in a variety of industries, from tourism to chicken farming to real estate.
He came to Hawaiʻi in the early 1990s, got an MBA from UH and launched a career in commercial real estate, eventually buying the firm Cushman & Wakefield ChaneyBrooks.
His secret to success is his skill at speaking Japanese. Sombrero grew up speaking the language with his mother, who’s from Okinawa, and later with his wife, who’s from Tokyo. He learned technical and business terms doing business with Japanese executives who sought to do business on Guam in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
He's put that knowledge of Japan to use in Hawaiʻi, working with Japanese clients who have done some large deals over the years in Waikīkī and Honolulu.
Perhaps his best-known deal is brokering the sale of more than two dozen luxury homes in Kāhala to Alexander & Baldwin in 2013. The seller was Japanese billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto, whose neglect of the homes had dismayed other homeowners in the high-end neighborhood.
Sombrero says it took him four years to get a meeting with Kawamoto, finally at a hotel in Tokyo. And then, Kawamoto added more properties to the deal, in Waimānalo and on Maui.
In all, Alexander & Baldwin spent $135 million on the portfolio, which Sombrero says was worth much, much more.
