Chasing Manhattan: Westchester’s Own Chase Welles on Big Plans for Big Apple
By Daniel Geiger September 4, 2012 7:15 am
reprintsFor years, Mr. Welles extolled to clients the virtues of being a practitioner of tenant-only work, in which there would be no conflicts of interest. After all, a broker who also works for a landlord might be tempted to guide a tenant to an influential owner’s space over another location, in order to cultivate a relationship with that landlord.
That once-potent rationale, however, has appeared to fall out of favor in the leasing brokerage business.
Several brokerage firms, particularly boutique companies like Northwest Atlantic, have moved to align themselves with larger partners, mergers that have often resulted in them broadening their representation to include landlords. A brokerage group led by broker Ginny Pittarelli that was once with the company Madison Marquette, for instance, recently joined with the large retail ownership company Crown Equities. Joseph Sitt, another major retail landlord in the city, meanwhile, has launched his own brokerage firm, Thor High Street.
A competing logic has begun to prevail to justify the mergers, or at least defuse the potential concerns. Landlord work gives brokers a closer knowledge of market conditions like rents and availabilities, key measures that landlords pay especially close attention to in order to price their space and which they often predicate a real estate investment on.
Merging with the Shopping Center Group will also provide Mr. Welles with a sturdier business platform, specifically a national network of offices that can help him better serve New York clients who want to branch out, a common game plan for those who have achieved success in the city. For a broker who rose in the business cultivating big tenants, it seems unlikely that the influence of owners would have much sway on how he would steer a client.
“We got to the point where we started to really see that there won’t be a conflict, that this in fact would allow us to help our clients even more,” Mr. Welles said. “This is a great way to grow and work on exciting projects. It’s a good thing.”
Mr. Welles started in the real estate business shortly after graduating from Columbia in the 1980s. He went for an interview at the real estate company owned by the New York landlord Bob Quinlan, even though his original preference was to find a job on Wall Street like many of his friends.
“They told me they’d like to hire me, and I said, sorry, I’m really looking for a gig in finance,” Mr. Welles remembered. “Then they said, did we mention that the job comes with a unit in one of our residential buildings?”
