Chasing Manhattan: Westchester’s Own Chase Welles on Big Plans for Big Apple
By Daniel Geiger September 4, 2012 7:15 am
reprintsMr. Welles wound up working for Mr. Quinlan for years, through his 20s and into his 30s. When he started, he had little experience in the real estate business. At Columbia, he had studied literature. Working around Mr. Quinlan proved to be an education.
“To learn from a guy like Bob, it’s visceral: he teaches you how to take at deal right to the edge, he plays brinksmanship to the full, Mr. Welles said. “To start his business, Bob took 50 credit cards to pay for everything and just charged it. He has a tremendous acumen, it’s making intelligent decisions quickly. When he was renovating a building I remember, the contractor went bankrupt, I mean, this was a big job. A lot of people would be screwed. But Bob put his own construction company together quickly and finished it. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Though Mr. Quinlan was involved in many areas of the real estate business, such as investing and renovating properties, Mr. Welles began early on to focus on retail at the company. Mr. Quinlan owns dozens of buildings on the Upper West Side, and Mr. Welles became the in-house executive who oversaw retail leasing in the large portfolio.
By the 1990s, Mr. Welles became aware of the lucrative possibilities of working in a traditional brokerage role, as a third-party representative who arranges a deal on behalf of a tenant. In his spare time while working for Mr. Quinlan, Mr. Welles began pitching big tenants, such as Costco, sites that he was aware of in the city. Doing this, he became friendly with Mr. Firestein and some of his colleagues, who had started Northwest Atlantic, a company that was originally founded to handle deals nationally specifically for Costco
“I was sending them ideas for these sites, and they said, ‘Why don’t work for us?’” Mr. Welles said. “David had a lot of contacts. I didn’t have a lot of contacts, being at a small company. He kind of brought me into the big retail circles he’s involved in.”
The firm was based in White Plains, but its location slightly outside the fold of the city didn’t hold Mr. Welles back from cultivating major relationships with a roster of tenants, including Staples, Kohl’s, Au Bon Pain and other major retailers.
Adding to his stature in the industry, Mr. Welles was named the head of REBNY’s retail committee, a three-year chairmanship he just completed recently. The term, which thrust him to center stage at REBNY’s myriad industry events and meetings, made him a recognized face in the business.
Perhaps at a stage of his career where he has begun to feel confident of his place in the business, Mr. Welles has a few controversial views.
“I think Jeff Winick is the top broker in the city by far,” he proclaimed, referring to a retail deal-making executive who is often lambasted by peers for his hard-charging—some say bullying—style in arranging transactions. Mr. Welles said he isn’t biased in his remark: he isn’t a friend of Mr. Winick’s, but has come to the conclusion having worked across the table on deals with him.
“If I have a deal on and I need to get the deal done, he’s the guy I want on the other side, because I know he’s not going to fuck it up,” Mr. Welles said. “The guy doesn’t miss a trick, and he gets deals done. He’s not there to have tea and cookies. He’s there to get the deal done and that’s what he does, and you’ve got to respect that.”
A few months in at the new firm, Mr. Welles is already handling a list of landlord rep assignments. He’s still focused on the tenant side of the business. Rite Aide, a tenant he works with, has quietly begun to expand in the city, a fact he finds remarkable, given the way the big brands like Duane Reade, Walgreens and CVS have dominated the market for drugstore tenants to the point of excluding other competitors.
“Right now we’re doing five stores in the city,” Mr. Welles said. “Rite Aide is not sleepy; they’re making a shocking amount of money.”
