Mr. Clark in the World Financial Center, one of Brookfield's trophies.

Our Jotham Sederstrom caught up with Ric Clark, president of downtown Manhattan's biggest office landlord, Brookfield, just as news of major moves at the firm trickled out. Chiefly, CB Richard Ellis exec Mitch Rudin would leave that firm after more than two decades to head Brookfield's U.S. operations.

Why'd Mr. Rudin do it? According to Mr. Clark:

I don’t think he had even entertained moving on, and he was really happy. He had been with CBRE for 21 years, but it was one of those opportunities that was a perfect fit and doesn’t come along often. It interested him so he thought about it for a while and we just kind of entered into a dialogue and we eventually were able to convince him to leave—even though I think he was otherwise happy to stay put.

Plus!

We’ve got a lot going on in the United States. We are fortunate to have a major position in what we believe are the two emerging neighborhoods in Manhattan.

The first is Lower Manhattan, which is going through a dramatic shift. It’s just a year or two away from making a complete transformation. And then next up after that, and only a couple years behind it, is the West Side of Manhattan where we have a site that we think is the best-positioned site in the city. And we’re expecting to build 5.4 million square feet of new property.

So I think the prospect of being involved in those two things over the next several years had to be very exciting to Mitch.

More in next week's Commercial Observer.

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