CHICAGO-Cushman & Wakefield of Illinois Inc. has hired three local brokers to create a retail team. Meredith Oliver and Luke Molloy have joined the firm as senior directors, and Brent Wayburn, who specializes in restaurant brokerage, will be a director.
Oliver and Wayburn were previously with Metro Commercial Real Estate. Molloy was an associate with Mid-America Real Estate Co. Both companies did not return phone calls for comment.
Shawn Mobley, recently hired as EVP for Cushman & Wakefield, said in a statement that the firm is committed to building the strongest possible presence in Chicago by aligning global services. This commitment “made adding retail services a top priority,” Mobley said. The company completed more than 2,660 retail transactions in the US in 2010.
Oliver tells GlobeSt.com that the new team had known each other and had planned to make such a move for awhile. “We saw a hole in the Chicago market that we could fill,” he says. “The Cushman platform was an attractive platform for us.”
Molloy tells GlobeSt.com that Mobley was not a factor in the team’s hire. Mobley is being sued by his previous employer, Grubb & Ellis, for allegedly encouraging employees there to leave and join Cushman & Wakefield. A number of Grubb employees have also left the firm for other companies, including the retail team of Peter Block, Eric Suffoletto and Brad Teitelbaum, who all recently joined Colliers International. A Grubb spokesperson says the company does not wish to comment on the departures.
“It’s not about Shawn at all, his name is new to me, actually. People such as Gene Spiegelman and Matt Winn were more the reasons why we joined,” Molloy said.
Oliver said the retail market has seen a vast improvement from two-to-three years ago. “Retailers have begun new in-house real estate staff and are building a pipeline of deals. We’re engaged in doing a lot of long-term planning for clients, and we anticipate a lot of closings for the rest of the year,” he says.
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