Siegel was involved in a number of notable 2011 transactions, including the 20-year, 125,000-square-foot lease for MSCI Inc. that brought 7 World Trade Center to full occupancy. And he was there for law firm Zukerman Gore Brandeis & Crossman's lease at 11 Times Square (where, a year before, he helped broker Proskauer Rose's 406,000 square foot, 20-year lease.) At both properties, Siegel represented the landlord. The deals were transformative in their own way and spoke to the appeal of LEEDcertified, state-of-the-art construction.

With an eye to the future, Siegel says that the young people entering the workforce now may be among the last generation to start their careers in buildings that are not LEED certified and green—inside and out. "My biggest appeal to law firms when I'm selling or leasing new assets is that you're making a mistake if you go into any old building," he says. "Even if your interior is LEED certified, with bamboo and other sustainable materials, it's not the same thing because you really can't pump in fresh air. It's a different environment and for your own sake, for recruitment sake, you should be looking at LEED-certified buildings."

Speaking of recruitment, it's what talent— new and existing—brings to the table that's at the heart of a firm's success. And at CBRE, nothing trumps human capital. Mary Ann Tighe, CBRE's Tri-State CEO, says that "our people infrastructure is the magic of this operation." And her team of colleagues "has such depth of knowledge. We can answer pretty much any kind of real estate question and we can come up with things that other people can't, because the collective intelligence and experience of this group is very powerful."

Finding and fostering new talent is an important part of any successful business— at least any business that plans to carry present successes into the future. At CBRE, much of this responsibility falls on the shoulders of Matt Van Buren, who was promoted to president of the New York Tri-State region last August after filling the spot on an interim basis. Believe it or not, he says, "One of the challenges when you're a large shop is the recruitment of new talent. But we set out to improve our talent by recruiting." To illustrate, Van Buren cites the addition of former Newmark Knight Frank retail broker Amira Yunis, who joined CBRE in November 2011 along with some NKF colleagues. "That's an example of real progress," he adds. "It had been a while since we added talent of that caliber. That's going to continue."

Also with the aim of securing the firm's future, Van Buren says CBRE has just graduated another class from its Wheel Program, which exposes top candidates right out of college to all parts of the business for 18 months to two years. Those graduates are then integrated into parts of the firm. "Each summer we have about 40 interns that come into our tri-state business and that's been a tremendous source of talent," he says.

Part of what CBRE has to offer is its existing talent pool and resources, which are crucial even for veterans like vice chairman Darcy Stacom. "There are so many tools here that I get to call on constantly because the client wants them," she says. Those tools, she says, include tax advisory, environmental services and global corporate services platforms.

Also significant is CBRE's consulting team. "We have a dedicated consulting organization of 30 to 40 experts," Van Buren says. "They are MBAs and accountants and architects. We're able to reach into that repository and bring their unique talents to bear on our largest, most complex opportunities."

Most of the Tri-State Region consulting team is located in New York City, says Michael Geoghegan, vice chairman and cohead of the Consulting Group. He adds, though, that "there are some consultants that have gone to different locales because they find being local is important."

The core of the group has been together "for 20-plus years," adds Gregory Tosko, vice chairman and a member of the Consulting Group's Operating Committee. But, again, it's a practice area where the influx of new talent is crucial.

"We really get top-notch talent," Geoghegan says of the group's recruiting efforts. "Since the New York market has become more complicated, and the types of transactions and structures we put in place, we've got a core group of people whose talent level continues to rise" to meet that new level of client/market sophistication.

According to Tosko, consulting groups were once "relegated to a lower rung within organizations," he says. As CEOs began to realize that real estate was their second most expensive cost (behind human capital), the value brought by the consulting group was recognized. "We're integral from start to finish and we use the same approach whether we're analyzing leases or structuring deals."

CBRE has been a major force in the never-ending reshaping of the figurative and literal landscape in New York City. Perhaps no company's story illustrates this better than Condé Nast, which late last year signed on as anchor tenant for 1 World Trade Center even though its lease at its current Times Square location wasn't set to expire until 2019.

In a sense, the alignment with Condé was the perfect pairing: two companies, both with business models dependent on the prescience they bring to the consumers of their product. "If you were to distill to its essence what Condé Nast is, they're not publishers of magazines or creators of website content; they're people who predict the future in fashion, in politics," says Tighe, architect, along with Tosko, of Condé's Times Square and World Trade Center deals.

Condé, she says, "could have just sat in Times Square until April 2019 and been perfectly comfortable. They elected to go to the Trade Center. In the fullness of time, people will understand, because Condé saw things that aren't yet clear to other people about the nature of the neighborhood, the transportation, the compelling economics. They saw all this and said, 'This is perfect for the kind of business we are.' "

The deal also illustrates the left-brain, right-brain cooperation between the consulting group at the firm and the brokerage side, which pioneering Manhattan broker (and CBRE legend) Edward S. Gordon realized was of utmost importance. "He said, 'My best consultants won't be my best brokers, and my best brokers won't be my best consultants,'" quotes Geoghegan.