The Gainesville Broker Who Turned Local Knowledge Into a Market-Leading Practice
The Crexi Team
May 26, 2026
Dan Drotos moved to Gainesville for college, earned three degrees at the University of Florida, and built his career in a market that most national firms overlooked. That focus paid off.
Today he is the founding President of Lee & Associates Gainesville, leading a team that has transacted more than $1 billion in local commercial real estate and holds close to 200 active listings on Crexi. In January 2026, he launched the Lee & Associates office in Gainesville as its managing principal, bringing a nationally recognized platform to a region he has spent 15 years learning from the inside. He is also a four-time Crexi Platinum Award winner.
You have built your entire career in one market. What drew you to Gainesville, and what has kept you here?
Gainesville is home to the University of Florida, a top-five public university, and together with Santa Fe College the area has north of 70,000 students. That has a direct and lasting impact on the local economy. The university and the college are top employers not just in Alachua County but across 13 rural outlying counties. On top of that, we have three major hospital systems here.
As the baby boomer generation ages and more people are retiring, a lot of them are coming into this market for healthcare-related services, which flows directly into commercial real estate demand, from medical office down to retail. So we keep a very close eye on two main economic drivers: education and healthcare. Once you understand how those engines work, you can read this market in ways that are hard to replicate from the outside.
How did you get started in commercial real estate, and what shaped your early years in the business?
I went to undergrad at Florida, graduated with a finance degree in 2009, then stayed for graduate school and finished in 2012 with a master’s in real estate and a master’s in building construction from the Nathan Collier School at UF. In my last year of graduate school I got connected with a very successful broker in this market and was fortunate enough to intern with him over a two-year period. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.
That was back in 2010, and I’ve been a broker in this market ever since. Our team has grown considerably over the last 16 years, across multiple asset classes and markets. It’s been a great ride.
You work in what the industry would consider a tertiary market. How does that shape your approach to technology and data?
Gainesville is a fragmented market. You have dedicated commercial practitioners, residential practitioners, and then hybrid agents who dabble in both. In that kind of environment, having a comprehensive platform matters more than it might in a major metro, because there’s no single dominant source of truth.
When Crexi came along, it really served the whole market, from small mom-and-pop properties all the way up to institutional-grade assets and everything in between. It became the one-stop shop for listings across our entire market. People didn’t have to go anywhere else to get a complete snapshot of what was available. That was a genuinely welcome addition here.
Your team is predominantly on the listing side. How do you use Crexi to drive results for your clients?
We have close to 200 listings on Crexi right now, and for us the platform is primarily about exposure, outreach, and lead capture. It has been a genuine game changer. We can get in front of more buyers and more tenants, capture those leads, and follow up with them all within the same dashboard.
Beyond the listing tools, we use the comps, the map-based searching, the owner records, the data export capabilities. We’ve leveraged almost every feature Crexi offers. There always seems to be something new being added that helps our business, and the platform just keeps getting more useful.
How do you know your Crexi presence is actually translating into business?
We hear it constantly. At conferences, from peers, from investors, people tell us they see our listings all over Crexi and that we have deep market penetration here. That kind of feedback matters because it means our properties are being presented in a professional, credible way to the right audiences.
And beyond the feedback, we know we are winning deals specifically because of our presence on the platform. It’s not something we have to theorize about at this point. Crexi is the dashboard that industry practitioners, brokers, and investors in this market go to first, and being visible there at the level we are has a real competitive impact.
This is your fourth consecutive Crexi Platinum Award. What does that recognition mean to you?
It’s a huge honor. We are in the platform every single day, so it’s gratifying to be recognized for the work we’ve put in with it. I also think it reflects a genuine two-way partnership. We have contributed a lot of property-level data and comps into the Crexi dashboard because of our market penetration here, and Crexi has given us powerful tools and access to quality buyers and tenants in return. That kind of relationship, where both sides are getting real value, is what makes it sustainable.
How has the technology landscape in commercial real estate changed since you started, and where do you see AI fitting in?
The change over the past 15 years has been remarkable. I still interact with older brokers in this market who tell me about a time when putting up a sign and picking up the phone was basically the whole job. Nowadays there are countless tools, databases, and research resources that help us differentiate ourselves. At Lee & Associates, for example, we have adopted a custom GPT that we use on a daily basis through the OpenAI platform.
Every day we use it, it gets smarter, and we keep finding new ways to apply it. Administrative tasks that used to take meaningful time are done in seconds now. That makes us more efficient and more competitive for our clients. We’re really only at the beginning of what AI can do in commercial real estate, and I think the conversation a year from now is going to look completely different.
What advice would you give to someone early in their commercial real estate career?
Find the right mentor. I had an extraordinary one who really brought me up in this business, and that foundation has shaped everything that came after. Whether it’s an individual mentor or a team you can grow inside of, the environment you’re in matters enormously.
This is a relationship business through and through: build strong internal relationships with your team, build genuine external relationships with your clients, and understand that what you put into it is exactly what you get out of it. It’s entrepreneurial by nature. Keep showing up, keep doing the right things consistently, and the dividends come.
Learn more about the 2026 Crexi Platinum Awards and see the full list of recipients here.
