Trammell Crow principal Greg Green, and vice presidents Chris Helgesen and Carter Johnston will service the account. "We won the assignment in fourth quarter of '02," Green tells GlobeSt.com. "We've been transitioning in all along, but we just finalized all the negotiations."

According to Trammell Crow East Region president John Maher, McGraw-Hill's decision to integrate several key property-management functions represents a growing trend in corporate America. Large firms, he tells GlobeSt.com, are moving away from a single-transaction mentality and embracing long-term combination strategies. "It goes beyond consolidation," Maher says. "We view it as an evolutionary step that a lot of our customers are making. We like to focus in detail on how our clients perform processes and a lot more clients are looking to integrate services."

In practice, that means leaving behind traditional owner-manager relationships in favor of a closer, more team-oriented approach, Maher says. "We're fully integrated with the McGraw team at this point," he states. "It's intended to be a collaboration more than it is to hire a vendor to do something they used to do themselves. The combination of both of us working together allows us to do things that we would not have or could not have done on our own."