Avison Young's Justin Cazana on Knoxville's office boom, nuclear-driven growth, why tertiary markets quietly survived the office crisis, and how to build a dominant local practice.

Justin Cazana is a third-generation real estate professional and principal at Avison Young in Knoxville. Before commercial real estate, he spent nearly a decade in sports broadcasting — calling minor league baseball, SEC football, and Fox Sports Net Olympic coverage — before the family business pulled him home.

In this episode, Justin joins host Adam Siegel on why Knoxville's office market never really broke, what Oak Ridge and nuclear growth are doing to demand, and why investing in people is the unlock most brokers miss.

• Introducing Justin Cazana of Avison Young Knoxville
• Third-generation CRE: sweeping warehouses and dinner table deal talk
• From Auburn journalism to minor league baseball broadcasting
• Hall of Famers in the same league and why he eventually walked away
• Coming back to Knoxville and learning the business under his father
• Opening Cushman & Wakefield's Knoxville office in 2010 with seven brokers
• Managing people is the hardest part — and why hiring a COO changed everything
• The 10x mindset: what are the 20 things only you should be doing
• Assistants, VAs, and why every broker should view hires as investments
• Why they left Cushman for Avison Young in 2015
• In tertiary markets, the relationship outlasts the flag every time
• Knoxville by the numbers: a million-person metro, 24M square feet of office
• Why tertiary market office never collapsed the way primary markets did
• Smaller tenants, local ownership, and coming back to the office faster after COVID
• The retention math: upgrading from Class C to Class A pays for itself
• How HR became the real estate decision-maker
• The 11-minute commute and what makes Knoxville an easy sell
• No income tax, four seasons, UT football, and a Cubs AA ballpark
• Oak Ridge, nuclear growth, and 180,000 square feet of engineering deals in one year
• 92% occupancy, a supply problem, and developers ready to build on lease-up
• Why institutional developers haven't moved in — and local developers fill the gap
• Downtown Knoxville: no new office building since 1992
• The next three to five years: nuclear, airports, Smith & Wesson, and more

Justin Cazana is a Principal and broker at Avison Young's Knoxville office, where he specializes in both tenant and landlord representation across office, industrial, and retail asset classes. He holds both the SIOR and CCIM designations and has deep expertise in the Knoxville market, where he has built a practice rooted in local market knowledge and client relationships.

Justin's career path into commercial real estate was far from traditional. Before joining the industry, he worked in television and radio sports broadcasting, including minor league baseball, Fox Sports Net and Comcast Sports. After transitioning into commercial real estate over two decades ago, Justin played a key role in opening Cushman & Wakefield's Knoxville office and later helped lead the migration to Avison Young in 2015.

Today, Justin works across most commercial asset classes but with a focus on the Knoxville market and has built a reputation as the go-to expert for understanding one of the country's fastest-growing tertiary markets.

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