of aligning the right people with the right opportunities to drive
that solution for clients, and we’ve been able to do that in a nim-
ble and entrepreneurial way that allows us to be truly innovative.
That innovation could be around technology, social media mar-
keting or just a fresh approach to old problems.”
A bigger trend, Stettinius says, is that “there’s a generational
shift in the workplace. While legacy brands in many industries
continue to be successful, you look at the impact Under
Armour has had on Nike, or Whole Foods on Safeway or even
Apple on Microsoft. As the real estate industry matures, it’s
intuitive to see a similar challenger brand that provides legacy
services in a fresh, innovative way that distinguishes us from
some of our competition.”
Accordingly, says Stettinius, “We don’t believe we have to have
a presence in every single market in America or globally. What
we need to have is a plan to provide best-in-class services in every
market where our clients would like to have a presence.” He adds
that as the domestic economy revives, Cassidy Turley’s clients are
looking for “more resources to address the opportunities that
the recovery is presenting to them. Because we haven’t been
hampered by legacy debts acquired in the recession, our ability
to create a platform that can help them exploit those opportuni-
ties is very high.”
Observes Peter Hennessy, who joined Cassidy Turley from JLL
in 2011 as president of its New York City tri-state region, “We’re
never going to become as big as some of our competitors, people
that we go toe-to-toe with every day. Yet our intention is not to
become the biggest but to continue to be the best, and to have
our client base view us as a real strategic partner in the work that
they’re doing.”
The emphasis has paid off, thanks to a combination of exist-
ing relationships and vigorous business-development initia-
tives. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the firm completed
transactions valued at $22 billion in 2012, manages 455 million
square feet across the US on behalf of institutional, corporate
“We don’t believe we need a presence in every single market in America. We need to have a plan to provide best-in- class services in every market where our clients would like to have a presence.”
JOE STETTINIUS
CEO
and private clients and supports more than 28,000 domestic
corporate services locations.
Hennessy, who was brought in to provide “an injection of
energy” for an already well-performing operation that began life
as Colliers ABR, offers insight into the foundation underpinning
Cassidy Turley. “Most of these firms coming together were single-market firms, a few multi-market, but these were not nationally
focused organizations as the original Cassidy Turley organization
came together,” he says. Along with Colliers ABR, the other
founding organizations were Colliers Turley Martin Tucker,
Cassidy & Pinkard Colliers and Colliers Pinkard, which were
joined in 2010 by BT Commercial in Northern California, BRE
Commercial in Southern California, BRE Commercial in Arizona
and Colliers Houston & Co. of New Jersey as the Cassidy Turley
rebranding got under way.
“Clearly, we’ve been leaders in many of our markets historically, and we have come from origins where our local market was
the predominant interest that we had,” says Michael Kamm, who
headed Cassidy Turley’s Northern California operations—and,
before that, predecessor firm BT Commercial—before becoming the company’s president this past October. “As we put the
company together over the past five or six years, we felt it was
important to retain that local perspective and recognize that
local markets each have their own dynamics, but at the same
time overlay a national infrastructure and national service delivery capability” sought by corporate and institutional clients.
Accordingly, Kamm says, Cassidy Turley’s 3,700 profession-
als see themselves as both local and national players. “They
recognize the value and benefit to the client of that dual
aspect, because fundamentally, real estate services are deliv-
ered locally, yet it’s very important to have a national approach
to many of the business lines,” he says. “Any individual transac-
tion has a mostly local component, but there are elements that
need to have a national or regional perspective and service
delivery capability built in.”
He says that many of Cassidy
Turley’s clients have said they
believe the firm does “a better
job of integrating national and
local services and transactions
into a bundle than they have
experienced with other firms.
Our people get the notion that
our relationships with clients
are multifaceted. They under-
stand that we’re working as a
team to provide the service to
the client, and that service is
multifaceted. It’s not simply a
deal or a property-management
or project-management assign-
ment; it’s a relationship with a
client that can take us in any
one of those directions to solve
problems for the client.”
For Cassidy Turley’s 455-mil-
lion-square-foot property man-
agement platform, says the firm’s
