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Downturn Veterans Stress Survival Skills

NEW YORK CITY-Six commercial heavyweights who comprised the 'Local Legends Share Their Secrets' Power Panel at RealShare New York said the current downturn is not the worst they've seen.

By Paul Bubny and Cody Lyon | Updated on October 28, 2009

[IMGCAP(1)]NEW YORK CITY-The six commercial real estate heavyweights who gathered for the opening Power Panel at Wednesday’s eighth annual RealShare New York might have offered a fascinating oral history of the industry over the past half-century. However, they were not there to wax nostalgic for the conference’s more than 300 attendees, but instead to share some of the secrets of their longevity through numerous market peaks and troughs.

One of the “Local Legends” in the opening panel, CB Richard Ellis’ Stephen Siegel, said the reason everybody on the stage was a survivor was that they knew how to take advantage of opportunities amid a downturn. And the current downturn, said moderator Anthony Malkin, president of Malkin Holdings, is not the worst in the panelists’ memory; nor was the market peak of 2005-2007 the best they had ever seen.

In the view of Jerry Cohen, principal at Tishman Speyer Properties, the lowest of the lows was the early 1970s, when New York City nearly declared bankruptcy and “tenants were evacuating the city.” Julien Studley, founder in 1954 of the tenant-rep firm that bears his name, concurred, saying that the early ’70s was the first time his company had to think about letting employees go. Conversely, while Siegel, CBRE’s chairman of global brokerage, said the past few months would represent the busiest leasing year on an annualized basis that his company has seen, for him the best market was around 2000, when dot-com start-ups were gobbling up space.

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