Top C&W Broker Leaves for Ownership Opportunity

PORTLAND-Longtime Cushman & Wakefield broker Scott Madsen left the firm to be a principal in Capacity Commercial Group, a new independent local brokerage formed earlier this year. Madsen, previously a senior director and perennial top producer with C&W’s local office group, says he made the move in order to be a partner.”I’m ready to help grow an organization in an ownership role and that’s a big reason I’m making the move,” he says. “My new partners and I share a vision of building a leading company from the ground up and mentoring the next generation of brokers.”Capacity Commercial was formed in May by office brokers Mike Nye and Jeff Falconer and industrial specialist Don Ossey. Falconer and Nye left Trammell Crow to start the company. Ossey merged his company, Ossey Patterson, into the new firm. All three are members of the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors. Along with four other industrial brokers–Dan Slevin and Mark Hush from Colliers International and Allen Patterson and Nick Kucha from Ossey Patterson–the new company set up shop in Tom Moyer’s Fox Tower, subleasing 5,300 sf on the seventh floor from Louisiana-Pacific through 2011. Madsen, who is in the process of obtaining his SIOR designation, rounds out the office team. His experience is extensive, including major office leasing assignments such as Fox Tower to corporate headquarters relocations–includnig Kindercare Learning Center’s relocation from Alabama to Portland. All told, Madsen has closed 6.6 million sf of real estate transactions with a combined value of $560 million.Madsen launched his commercial real estate career as a leasing specialist with Macadam Forbes in 1979. He then co-founded the Corbett Co. Commercial Brokerage, which was acquired by C&W in 1987. He stayed with C&W until two weeks ago, when he made the move to Capacity Commercial. With Madsen comes his understudy Dan Richards, who graduated from Brigham Young University in May. Madsen’s move is the latest defection from the local office of C&W over the past several months. At the start of the year, top industrial broker Tony Reser left to join the new Portland office of Seattle-based GVA Kidder Mathews while his former partner at C&W, Linda Craig, left in June for Grubb & Ellis, where she is now working with another top industrial broker, Brad Fletcher. Two other C&W brokers, Coleen Colleary and Joe DeJager, also left and ended up at Kidder Mathews. The last time C&W experienced such losses in the city was 2001, when top producer Scott Langley left to become president of Ashforth Pacific and its top two office brokers–Mike Holzgang and Gordon King–packed up their personals and walked down the street to Colliers International.Terry Shanley, managing director for C&W’s local office, did not return a phone call seeking comment. At the time King and Holzgang left, he said C&W’s culture was changing and with that comes fallout. “I think (Colliers’) set up probably works better for Mike and Gordon than ours now does,” Shanley told GlobeSt.com. “Mike and Gordon are old school, lone wolves dragging meat into camp, and at C&W we are working more collaboratively among brokers than we ever have.”In 2001, GlobeSt.com spoke to several senior brokers in town about the increase in movement away from the big national brokerage houses. “It used to be very difficult to move because only large companies could afford the technology to produce marketing materials or track the market,” said one longtime local broker and manager. “You can now do all of those things with a $1,500 desktop computer, and because of that the large firms, especially the publicly traded ones, have struggled.” They also are struggling because they have too many rookies, said others. “If you lose (senior) people and replace them with junior people, then the expense of covering the junior people makes it hard to give bigger splits to senior people,” said one veteran broker, echoing the sentiments of several others. “Then competing brokerages with less overhead call up and offer you better splits and more assistance because they don’t have to send as much back to corporate to maintain the growth publicly traded companies need to maintain to continue increasing shareholder value.”