Revealed: Median salaries at some of real estate’s biggest public companies

UPDATED, May 17, 11:20 a.m.: Typical employees at CBRE make, on average, nearly 20 percent more than their counterparts at JLL.

And the average worker at Boston Properties earns more than the normal employee at Vornado Realty Trust, who takes home more than the average earner at SL Green Realty.

Public companies across the United States are revealing how much typical employees make for the first time in their financial disclosures as part of the mandate from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

The Wall Street Journal pulled together a database of median employee pay for more than 1,000 publicly traded companies collected by the firm MyLogIQ.

Among the big real estate investment trusts, the typical worker at Boston Properties – which has 740 employees – earned a median salary of $104,897, while Vornado had a median salary of $61,824 for its 3,989 employees.

Boston Properties CEO Owen Thomas, meanwhile earned a total compensation in 2017 of $10.06 million, according to public disclosures. Vornado’s Steven Roth brought home a total compensation package of $10.46 million during the same time (which does not include $2 million in stock dividends).

SL Green’s median salary was $57,508 for its 1,065 employees. Its CEO Marc Holliday earned $17.4 million last year, according to SEC filings.

(SL Green and Vornado’s median salary figures cover all employees. If building-service workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements were removed from the calculations, the median salaries for the companies would be $135,857 and $75,320, respectively.)

When it came to big commercial real estate brokerages, CBRE had a median salary of $57,303 for its 80,000 workers, and the median salary for JLL’s 82,000 employees was $48,000.

The highest-paying real estate company on the Wall Street Journal’s list is New Jersey-based hospitality REIT Chesapeake Lodging Trust, which had a median pay of $347,750 across 14 employees. [WSJ] – Rich Bockmann