Meet NYC’s next generation of top office brokers
How the younger dealmakers are reshaping the business
Mary Ann Tighe. Bruce Mosler. Howard Fiddle.
For decades, these power brokers and their competitors have reigned supreme over Manhattan’s office landscape.
As they enter their 60s and 70s, the old guard is being joined by young, hungry dealmakers in their 30s and 40s. The three-martini power lunches of yesteryear are out and data-driven pitch decks are in as this next generation sets the tone for the leasing business and changes the culture — all while navigating an anemic market.
Many of these brokers were just hitting their stride when Covid upended commercial real estate, and they had to adapt. Now they’re breaking some of the traditions of the generation of leaders that came before them and finding new ways to ink big-ticket deals.
“This is no longer the kind of business where you can just take someone out for a steak dinner and you can have a nice large lease transaction after that,” said 35-year-old JLL broker Benjamin Bass. “It’s a much more complicated, data-driven, advisory-type business.”
Working their way up
The workday for a wide-eyed up-and-comer can involve a lot of phone calls. Just ask Ethan Silverstein.
The 39-year-old Cushman & Wakefield exec still keeps a book from 2009 with dates and tallies of the cold calls he made. His record was 120 in one day.
“The cold-calling was a waste of time, but it was something that you had to do to be able to be accepted into this complex organization,” Silverstein said.
“I already knew that it was an essential function, from a cultural standpoint, to see if I could do it, even though I knew the success rate was not going to be nearly what it was in 1985.”
Silverstein went on to become the firm’s youngest-ever vice chair, then the youngest-ever executive vice chair, two of the most prestigious titles in brokerage.
One of his first big clients was real estate firm Compass when the then-startup was looking for 4,000 square feet of office space. He has since helped it lease over 100,000 square feet.
Silverstein was also part of a team that helped landlord Brookfield Properties ink leases for over 5 million square feet at Manhattan West.
“To be able to be a small part of a very large team that helped construct a 2 million-square-foot building where the value is billions of dollars and it changes the skyline and it was over a decade-long period is really, really satisfying,” he said.
“Overall, it’s very challenging for these junior and midlevel professionals because there’s so much power with these top brokers. It’s about having a sponsor, like who is going to go to bat for you when you’re not in the room, and it’s just really hard to find that. ”
The “Big Five” — CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Newmark, JLL and Colliers — didn’t exist when the older generation was coming up in the business. Brokerages have expanded geographically and gained market share by swallowing up smaller firms in consolidations over the years. The biggest, CBRE, now has more than 100,000 employees, and offices all over the world.
That makes it hard for a junior broker to stand out.
CBRE’s Chris Corrinet, 45, started out in the company’s consulting group before decamping to the brokerage side.
“Being a young person in consulting is distinct from brokerage because you get to work on bigger and more complicated deals at a younger age, albeit in a support role,” Corrinet said. “Deals that some brokers never get to work on. Period.”
As a young broker, Corrinet, a former pro hockey player, consulted on deals for Citibank’s headquarters at 388 Greenwich Street, Major League Baseball’s 400,000 square-foot lease at 1271 Sixth Avenue and the NHL’s lease at One Manhattan West.
He was already a vice chair when he walked away from a steady consulting salary in May 2020. He approached his bosses and told them he wanted to pivot to brokerage.
“The world had shut down; I turned 40 and I was like, ‘I need to try this now,’” he said. “‘If I wake up and I’m 50 and I don’t try it, I think I’ll forever regret it,’ so that was the catalyst to make the switch. I was going off to make more, or less.”
Payday
Brokers work solely on commission, unlike members of CBRE’s consulting group, who earn a salary and bonus. Entry-level brokers are sometimes paid “on a draw,” which means they earn a small salary but must pay it back with their first commission checks.
Representing tenants is the most lucrative segment of the business, and those brokers rake in the most revenue for firms. Tenant brokers get two-thirds of the commission on a typical office lease deal, and the remaining one-third goes to the broker for the landlord. Landlord brokers are also called agency representatives.
“In the agency business you have to work really, really, hard. The time is not yours, and there’s an old adage in our business that you work twice as hard for half the money,” said Newmark broker Ben Shapiro. “In the tenant rep business, you can have less clients and go deeper with your clients, and it’s more rewarding personally and financially.”
Members of the consulting groups generally avoid cold-calling and are placed on big deals early in their careers doing administrative and analyst work.
Brett Shannon, 35, started in CBRE’s consulting group, and later went to work for heavy hitters Fiddle and Peter Turchin representing some of the city’s biggest landlords.
“Usually, the entry into the brokerage community is ‘Here’s your phone, go start bringing in business, whatever you bring in you’ll get to work on,” Shannon said. “I think that would have been an environment which I would not have succeeded in. I would have struggled to get out there immediately and try to sell something when I didn’t know what I was selling.”
Finding a sponsor
Most rising brokers attached themselves to senior colleagues early in their careers. They started at the bottom of large teams and worked their way up slowly, deal by deal.
“Overall, it’s very challenging for these junior and midlevel professionals because there’s so much power with these top brokers,” said one former CBRE broker who left the business. “It’s about having a sponsor, like who is going to go to bat for you when you’re not in the room, and it’s just really hard to find that. All the people that we see now that are at the top primarily all had that opportunity of finding the right person.”
Cushman’s Silverstein was one of those lucky enough to land a sponsor. He joined the company at 22, fresh out of college, and started working with industry legend Mosler a few years later.
“I learned a tremendous amount about how to conduct yourself in the business from him,” Silverstein said. “It didn’t take me long to realize that if I wanted to succeed, I should try my best to learn from the best people, so I always was willing to get myself in the room and learn from those people.”
Colliers’ Reid Longley, 35, met his sponsor, Mac Horner, when they worked on the same floor at JLL. Horner’s junior broker was leaving the business, and he was looking to replace him.
“I was fortunate to have what I think of as hitting the jackpot of mentors,” Longley said. “I think I really owe a lot to Mac for what he did for me in teaching me the business.”
Some brokers didn’t have to look far for a sponsor. They followed their parents into brokerage.
”There’s a lot of second-generation people in our business,” said Cushman’s Bryan Boisi, whose father is an executive vice chair at the firm. “Most of those guys you think skip phase one, but realistically, it was a matter of going through all my school contacts, it was going through anybody I’d met over the years of college, and trying to leverage that.”
Boisi, 41, represents financial services tenants and Midtown landlords, with properties including the 1.8 million-square-foot office building at 277 Park Avenue owned by the Stahl Organization, an account he shares with his dad.
“The blessing is he sits 10 feet from me and I can have that sounding board, wherever and whenever,” Boisi said. “We definitely have a lot of partner accounts, but I’ve always had the tactic of being able to work across the floor.”
Titles
Titles are important to brokers, viewed as a sign of their worth at a firm. Promotions are based solely on the amount of revenue a broker generates. Beginner and midlevel titles vary from firm to firm, but vice chairs, executive vice chairs and chairs are at the top of the food chain at all five.
“It is important in our business,” said Steven Rotter, 45, who started as an associate at Newmark in 2004, then moved to JLL and worked his way up the ladder there. He returned to Newmark this year and became an executive vice chair.
“I had no idea what I was doing my first two years in the business,” Rotter said. Then he decided to focus on startups, small companies and private equity. He now represents large financial firms, such as the Carlyle Group, Macquarie and KKR.
“It’s a lot of big-name companies, and I think that started with some of the obscure companies that no one’s ever heard of,” he said. “I think that’s a big part of our business that some people miss.”
Breaking into the boys’ club
Although brokerage remains a heavily male-dominated industry, more and more women are making moves to the top. Some say being a woman has given them access to big deals, but breaking into the boys’ club isn’t easy.
“The guys go golfing together, they grab drinks after work, and you’re not always invited,” the former CBRE broker said. “It’s just hard to build those relationships, so you’re constantly competing with the guy next to you.”
Lauren Crowley Corrinet connected with top broker Tighe early in her career and has risen to vice chair at CBRE. She’s one of only 13 women out of about 200 who hold the title firmwide, she said (CBRE would not confirm the total number of vice chairs).
“The blessing is [my dad] sits 10 feet from me and I can have that sounding board, wherever and whenever.”
“I think I’ve been super lucky. I started in the business when the market was so hot, and all of a sudden the bottom dropped out,” said Corrinet, 39, who is married to Chris Corrinet. “I raised my hand for anything that anyone would let me do, and as a result of that I got to work on a whole variety of different projects.”
Corrinet found her niche in the new development world at a time when the TAMI tenants — technology, advertising, media and information — were on the rise. She was on a team with Tighe and senior broker Greg Tosko that brokered some of the earliest and largest leases at Hudson Yards to leather retailer Coach and cosmetics brand L’Oréal.
“At the end of the day, it’s about how you connect with people, and I think sometimes it can be easier for men because there are more men in the room,” Corrinet said. “I think women have to work harder to build a bridge because I’m not playing golf on the weekend and I’m terrible at sports stats. I try to find commonality in other ways.”
Cushman’s Paige Engeldrum, 32, landed her first big deal nine months into her career, after being hired by a senior broker through her college alumni network. She was tapped to help open a family office at the Soloviev Group’s iconic 9 West 57th Street.
“It was really the first big deal that I ever worked on, and it was so notable in terms of the rent and the quality and the caliber,” she said. “There were so many different things that were transformative for my career in terms of getting my name out there and getting my name on such a notable deal.”
JLL’s Kristen Morgan, 33, credits an early opportunity to work on RAL Development’s Zero Irving tech hub at 124 East 14th Street with catapulting her career. The world was shaken by Covid in the middle of construction, and tenants were starting to get cold feet.
“Then the market took a turn, and we leased out the whole building,” Morgan said. “We’re hoping to finish up the building now, and I just think the experience I got on that building, leasing up a new building at record high rents, I watched my career change from that building.”
An evolving business
Brokerages have increasingly become consulting businesses as they draw on all their resources to help clients work through the fallout from the pandemic. These days, clients want to hear from the capital markets, research and workplace strategy teams before inking a deal, said JLL’s Bass, who represents both landlords and tenants.
“It helps to create a much more thoughtful and strategic approach to their real estate business, and that’s requiring all of us at every level to change the way that we approach the business,” he said.
Younger brokers saw the pandemic as a window of opportunity. The slow office market forced them to look beyond their typical office lease deals and learn other segments of the market. Silverstein studied up on the industrial market and data centers.
“When people say commercial real estate, that can mean so many different things, and for me, up until 2019, all that really meant was office space,” Silverstein said. “But with a lack of demand for office space, if I still wanted to close as many deals and earn as much money, I needed to learn a new skill set.”
Crowley Corrinet landed one of her favorite deals in 2020, when she and Tighe stepped in to help Sotheby’s relocate from 1334 York Avenue. With their help, the auction house leased out more than half its headquarters to Weill Cornell Medicine, bought a converted office building in Long Island City for $82 million and signed a deal to purchase the landmark Breuer Building on Madison Avenue.
“Downturns are where people can really make their name,” she said. “I’ve been telling people for the past few years, ‘Don’t be scared, you’re young in this business and this is a great moment for you. You can spend this extra time learning, not to mention there are some bigger problems to solve. This is a great opportunity to see what you can really do.’”
Shapiro, 38, said he has built relationships by helping clients solve problems, including the biggest one: “Where do I put my people?”
“I didn’t build these relationships because I could get a great dinner reservation or hockey tickets, because you don’t do that any more. The business has changed,” Shapiro said. “It’s still a very social business, but people want to go home to their families, not wine and dine at steakhouses. That’s the way the previous generation did it.”