Morris, Kolar to Head Cresa’s Suburban Chicago Office Leasing Team

Veteran Chicagoland leasing brokers have jumped ship to join tenant-serving commercial real estate brokerage Cresa, leaving JLL and Avison Young.

Rick Morris, formerly a principal with Avison, and Mark Kolar, who was a senior vice president at JLL, are Cresa’s newest additions and will lead its expansion into the suburban Chicago office market.

Their moves to a brokerage that focuses specifically on serving tenants — rather than both landlords and occupiers such as the largest brokerages CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield and Colliers — comes as office landlords face a changing landscape for the demand and value for physical workplaces coming out of the pandemic.

Working with a tenants-only brokerage eliminates any perception of a conflict of interest sometimes applied to brokerages serving both sides of deals.

“There’s just a lot of uncertainty about (tenants’) relationship to office space moving forward and I think there’s a lot of uncertainty on the landlord side as well, and I’m happy to be at a company where I can solely focus on tenant representation and be able to objectively look at say, this is the right decision for you,” Kolar said. “You want to develop a win-win between a landlord and a tenant and want to see everyone prosper, but at the end of the day you want to make sure your client’s getting the best possible deal they can.”

Kolar’s clients have included Bank of America, Consumers Credit Union, Charles Industries, FANUC and Great American Insurance. He has also worked as a commercial lender with LaSalle National Bank.

Morris has arranged more than five million square feet of leases valued at $1 billion, with clients including Titan Security, Bauderer Packaging, Corcentric and Medulla.

Cresa moved its headquarters to Chicago’s Fulton Market from Washington, D.C., earlier this year. Its new president, Greg Schementi, told The Real Deal in August that the tenant-focused model liberates the firm from “an inherent conflict of interest” present in much of the business.

Cresa has said it plans to expand the number of Chicago employees three-fold to about 150 over the next couple of years. The firm has about 80 offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

“Chicago is our new headquarters and we intend to make many more senior hires here. We’re just getting started,” Laws said.

The firm says it has added seven senior advisors in the last year and a half.