From the August issue: The office culture of a commercial real estate firm is largely determined by whether a firm is privately owned or publicly traded, sources said, as well as the system that brokers operate under. Public companies tend to be pressure cookers because they have to report to investors, brokers said.
“When you work for a publicly owned firm, you have to report quarterly,” said Woody Heller, executive managing director and a top broker at Studley, who worked at publicly traded Jones Lang LaSalle. “That’s a very different mindset, which imposes certain pressures and short-term thinking, which are difficult to work with. At the end of the year, or the end of the quarter, I’d have people walk into my office and ask, ‘Is there any way to accelerate the closing of this transaction?’ That may not be the right thing to do for the transaction.”
At privately held Studley, by contrast, “We don’t report to anybody but ourselves,” Heller said. “That gives us a lot of flexibility to do what we think is right.”
This is an excerpt from “NYC’s best commercial firms to work for,” which originally appeared in The Real Deal’s August issue. To read the complete article click here.