Local sources report that the dealmakers themselves--headed by Richard Fulton--will vie in future weeks to take the company back to its transactional roots, narrowing its focus once again to a local brokerage business. In August, Fulton was appointed EVP of transaction services for the firm's eastern region.

Such a move would effectively take the gas out of president and CEO Barry Barovick's dream of an integrated-services platform. The irony here would be that Barovick has gone on record as saying that his platform, marketed both internally and externally as Project Iowa, met with almost universal praise when he and his chief financial, operating and strategy officers rolled the plan out to all regional offices last year. "What was an interesting discovery is that the local broker wanted the same thing we wanted," Barovick told GlobeSt.com at the time.

Late yesterday, Barry Barovick denied that any such movement was afoot. "Has anybody approached me about a broker buyout? Absolutely not," he told GlobeSt.com. Dick Fulton, who is with affiliate Grubb & Ellis/Centennial Inc. in Tennessee, did not return phone calls.

Rumors circulating around town this week had all of this coming to a head at a special board of directors meeting, held here yesterday. Grubb EVP and chief legal officer Robert Walner squelched those rumors. "We had our regular board meeting and it was business as usual," he told GlobeSt.com. Asked if a broker buyout or the future of Project Iowa were major components of the meeting, Walner only repeated: "It was business as usual."

However, if the firm were to revert to a transactional business and Project Iowa goes by the boards, the future of the C-Suite may also be in question, says our source. That clutch of offices is populated by CFO Ian Bress and CSO Elizabeth Kulik. COO Mark Costello left Grubb to return to Ernst & Young in the closing days of 2002.

If an employee takeover does kick in, it would be the second time that the New York City brokerage community was witness to such an event. Mitch Steir helmed his team into a similar buyout of Julien J. Studley late last year.