The Short Version

• Beta Agency co-founder Mitchell Hernandez draws on his Cuban roots, family values and vision to shape retail real estate.
• His career spans roles with CBRE to the launch of Beta Agency in El Segundo, California, where he helps clients navigate disruption with long-term strategies.
• Active in ICSC, Hernandez balances industry impact with family life alongside his wife and twin sons.

How Mitchell Hernandez Built a Real Estate Career on Family, Values and Vision

Like many Cuban Americans, Mitchell Hernandez’s roots trace to a tempestuous time for the island nation. After a decade of suffering Fidel Castro’s repressive regime, his mother and her immediate family escaped Cuba in the late 1960s. During calmer times, Hernandez’s great-grandmother had babysat Raúl Castro, who in 2008 succeeded his older brother Fidel as Cuba’s president.

Thanks to fate and some incredible luck, both of Hernandez’s parents managed to move to the U.S. from countries that offered few opportunities. Hernandez’s mother was enrolled in medical school when Fidel took power in 1959. But she and her father, a Cuban congressman and dentist, suddenly lost their livelihoods, which were tied to the state-run government. They struggled to make ends meet until his grandmother, who previously had traveled regularly to Cancun, wrangled permission for the family to vacation there. In 1969 the family went to Mexico but never returned home, eventually earning their green cards and moving to California.

Hernandez’s father, on the other hand, moved from Peru to Brazil to attend the University of São Paulo but always sought something bigger. He’d applied repeatedly to work and study in the U.S. to no avail and finally headed to the U.S. embassy in search of assistance. There, he spotted a large group of people around his age queuing up for something. When an embassy worker asked if he was part of the group of exchange students slated to depart for the States, he replied: “Uh, yes I am.” The worker told him to get in line. He managed to enroll in UCLA as an exchange student, soon transferring to Loyola Marymount University, where he earned his master’s degree. Hernandez’s parents later met in nearby Redondo Beach, California.

Though Hernandez, co-founder and co-partner of the fast-growing California commercial real estate advisory and transaction firm Beta Agency, identifies as Latino, he said: “I am an American first and proud to be one.”

From Southern Childhood to L.A.’s Transforming Real Estate Scene

As a child, Hernandez found himself drawn to real estate, but he first had to endure the culture shock of his family moving from rural Louisiana to Los Angeles’ Hollywood in 1992 just two months before what have become known as the L.A. riots. “Kids on the block would say: ‘Why do you look Hispanic but have that Southern accent? What’s wrong with you?’” he recalled. “It was a tribal thing; you just got held to a different standard if you were somebody different.” But Hernandez settled in, slowly reassuring his new friends that he was one of them.

As he grew, Hernandez developed a penchant for building things. He became an avid Lego enthusiast and marveled at the changing scene around him. “I recognized there was all this crazy transformational change going, and I watched the area became a huge catalyst for development with things like L.A. Live and The Grove going up and all construction in Hollywood, Silverlake and Echo Park,” he said. Hernandez began to realize that the evolving landscape “all came back to real estate,” he added. He became enamored with land development and aspired to be a part of it.

From USC to CBRE: Early Career Foundations

Hernandez entered the University of Southern California with a focus in real estate development and interned at Forest City Realty Trust, a REIT since acquired by Brookfield Asset Management. He graduated in the midst of the Great Recession, grateful he hadn’t emerged a year or so earlier. “If that had happened, I would have gotten a good job then promptly lost it and I would have really been screwed,” he said. Hernandez worked as a part-time intern at CBRE before being hired on full time in early 2009. “As it turns out, I started out as cheap labor, so the only way I could go was up,” he said.

Since then, humanity has played a prime role in the Beta executive’s modus operandi. “I’ve learned that the most important factor in business, as in life, is realizing we are people first,” said Hernandez, who spent a decade making retail deals for CBRE’s El Segundo, California, office before co-founding Beta Agency there in 2018.

Today, Hernandez and Beta co-founders Richard Rizika, also a former CBRE executive, and Xan Saks use design, analytics and a little elbow grease to find tenant solutions for their tenant and owner/developer clients, said Hernandez. The firm, he explained, is less like a traditional brokerage and more of an advisory, helping clients execute deeply considered strategies to stay ahead of the curve, not just making deals for their own sake. “One thing we’re especially proud of is that we’ve been a principle-driven company from Day One with strong core values and collective behaviors,” he said. “We understand disruption is inevitable and commit ourselves to helping our clients avoid the landmines and address the pressing issues. It’s all about rolling up our sleeves and figuring things out together, embracing some discomfort and realizing that nothing is forever.”

Beta Agency’s Growth Amid a Shifting Retail Market

Today’s retail landscape, said Hernandez, has evolved from race-to-the-bottom discounting to trust-in-brand relationships in which shoppers consistently patronize specific retailers, including mass marketers. “Consumers are going for meaningful convenience,” he said. “For example, there’s a loyalty and trust that end users of Costco and Walmart have and how they view their private-label brands that are juggernauts for these retailers.”

Beta, which recently celebrated its seventh anniversary, has grown from an upstart to a midsize firm with 25 employees, focusing on projects in Southern California and serving retailers with locations across multiple markets. Its property types are myriad, ranging from a Target- and Home Depot-anchored center in San Fernando to the 256,000-square-foot Crenshaw Imperial Plaza in Inglewood and a curated collection of high street retail on Venice’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard. The mix of brick-style buildings and a restored bungalow are home to 10 high-profile brands like Todd Snyder, Velvet by Graham & Spencer and Intelligentsia Coffee. Among the latest tenants Beta is bringing in for owners are Tesla, Aritzia and Club Studio, a premium fitness concept developed by the company behind LA Fitness.

Shaping the Industry Through Leadership and Mentorship

Hernandez has held numerous ICSC roles over the past 15 years, including in the Next Generation Leadership Network’s 2022-2024 cohort. He served as the Western Next Generation Division Chair in 2019 and Next Gen California State chair prior to that. “I love helping people, and I saw an organization in Next Gen that was created to allow our young professionals to network,” said Hernandez, who also served with the ICSC PAC and helped develop the ICSC 4 Under 40 program as part of the Next Generation Leadership Board. “These things were natural for me.” More recently, he organized a roundtable discussion on the role of artificial intelligence in the real estate industry at an ICSC+OAC event in Tampa.

Hernandez garnered three awards during his CBRE career: the Bruce Kaplan Urban Mixed-Use Award for collaborating across disciplines and influencing the mixed-use market by maximizing client and project returns, the Gary J. Beban Teamwork Award for incorporating multidisciplinary approaches into CBRE and the Marianne Waggoner Award as National Retail Rookie of the Year for teamwork, camaraderie and high production as a first-year retail salesperson.

He has served on the USC Alumni Association board and is a past member of the Urban Land Institute’s Los Angeles Young Leaders Group. He holds a CI101 distinction for financial analysis and a CI104 distinction for investment analysis from the CCIM Institute.

Outside the Office: Family, Hobbies and Life Beyond Work

The energetic Hernandez is an active snowboarder, hiker and beach volleyball player — hobbies he enjoys along with music, reading and listening to podcasts. But his favorite way to spend his downtime is at home “hanging out with the wife and kids,” he said. “I have 5-year-old twin boys who just started kindergarten. We have so much fun with them.”