CBRE’s Mark Ravesloot: The Renaissance Man With the Gift of Gab

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Mr. Ravesloot’s dealmaking is also varied in that he represents both landlords and tenants. If there has been a theme in Mr. Ravesloot’s career and life, it has been his ability to adapt.

He started in brokerage at Jones Lang Wootton, the predecessor to the major services company Jones Lang LaSalle, in the early 1980s. Mr. Ravesloot’s intellect and analytical approach meshed well with the firm’s corporate culture. In college, he had taken only a single computer science class, in what was an emerging field of study then, but the basics of the course work had stuck with him.

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“You would take punch cards and literally write your program on the card by punching holes in it and feeding it into the computer so it could read it and do the calculations you wanted,” Mr. Ravesloot remembered.

Jones Lang Wootton had installed a terminal that could relay information to a mainframe computer in Dallas that would perform the routines. The system was primitive by today’s standards but Mr. Ravesloot immediately grasped its potential at a time when leases were typically evaluated and arranged in a far more unsophisticated manner than they came to be in the digital age.

“There were no analytics provided to the client,” Mr. Ravesloot said.

“If the rent was $12.50 per square foot, then the broker might say ‘Take it down by 25 cents’. There was no Excel or Lotus. You had to write the whole program, and I was fascinated by the ability to do this.”

Mr. Ravesloot began running more complex analyses for tenants he was working with, calculating and comparing the assemblage of varying factors that comprise the economics of a deal, including rent, the costs of constructing an office and other factors like landlord incentives. The work was useful enough to the modest sized tenants Mr. Ravesloot worked with at the time, but its value was not lost on more senior brokers at the firm, whose bigger tenants could especially benefit from such a rigorous computer-aided evaluation.

“Some of the senior brokers started noticing, and they said ‘Hey that’s pretty cool, can you run this lease for me?’” Mr. Ravesloot said. “And I quickly started getting involved in deals that were much larger than I otherwise would have.”

By the late 1980s, Mr. Ravesloot was on track to become a top broker at Jones Lang Wootton, but a curve ball would come his way. In an effort to double down as a more consultative, corporate-minded real estate services company, it abolished commissions, wiping out its entire brokerage corps almost overnight.

Rather than drop out of the firm, as many of his colleagues did, to head for competitors, Mr. Ravesloot scrambled to recast his situation.

He had business to finish in his pipeline, which bought him time. When those transactions did finally wind down, he figured top level management at the company would begin to wonder if the decision had been sound, given the exodus of brokers. Mr. Ravesloot, meanwhile, rushed to draft a business plan to keep his team and his compensation structure intact.