Checking In: Jones Lang LaSalle’s Sean Black on Foursquare’s 568 B’way Deal

“I was on Lafeyette, and there was a big WeWork sign at 154 Grand of a guy breaking a computer and that seemed really interesting to me, and so I started doing research on the company,” Mr. Black said. He wound up helping the company take 75,000 square feet at 175 Varick Street last year and 44,000 square feet over the summer at 261 Madison Avenue.

“Sean doesn’t try to broker me,” Mark Lapidus, an executive at WeWork, said over drinks recently. “If we tell him we’re looking for this kind of an office space in this kind of a location, he doesn’t come back to me and say, well, here’s what you can get, like a lot of brokers will. He’ll go out and he’ll find it for you or get you the closest thing he can. He doesn’t try to turn you away from your goals as a company.”

Mr. Black certainly knows his craft, but his background, no doubt, also plays a role in his ability to fight hard for feisty upstarts like WeWork and Foursquare. Spending the early part of his childhood in Texas, the son of a Jamaican father and a mother of predominantly Irish descent, Mr. Black experienced firsthand the struggle to excel among his peers.

“In Texas, you were either white, black or Mexican, and I didn’t fit into any of those,” said Mr. Black, who is 41 and has exotic good looks, olive skin, freckles and wiry red hair. “And so I was bullied.”

By the time Mr. Black was in high school, he and his mother had relocated to Toronto. Mr. Black got an early start in the real estate business. His uncle was a successful commercial leasing broker, and by the time he was in college, Mr. Black began working with him. Like many young brokers, he was assigned grunt work, trolling through buildings to map their tenancy in order to create stacking plans for the company. It was doing this that Mr. Black discovered he had the kind of gift for conversation that is an essential skill for most brokers.

“I would go into offices to get information about the company, and oftentimes I would bump into the CEO of a company, and I developed a real ease speaking with people like that on the fly,” Mr. Black said. “I would come back to the office with these great leads, and a lot of the senior brokers would be really surprised and impressed, I think.”

It was around this time, at age 19, that Mr. Black began boxing. He didn’t have an immediate love for the sport, he said, but found he was good at it. By the time he was in his mid 20s, Mr. Black had become very good indeed as a top amateur 156-pounder in Canada who had a shot at qualifying for the country’s boxing team for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

But then, Mr. Black’s father, who he hadn’t been in close contact with, was murdered in Jamaica. The details of the killing were foggy, but Mr. Black said it was eventually discovered that his father had been arrested after an altercation in a bar, and that the police officers who had brought him into detention had killed him, perhaps unintentionally, during a beating.

It was the kind of crushing blow that could derail a young man’s life and career, but Mr. Black remembers it as a galvanizing moment. He left Canada and opted instead to try out for the Jamaican Olympic boxing team, a highly competitive slot that he eventually won. He wound up competing in the Atlanta games, losing a close match in round-robin competition.

“I wanted to use my place on the team as a platform to speak out and get justice for my father,” he said.
The strategy worked. Eventually the officers involved in the murder were convicted, Mr. Black said.

“I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve tried to do in my life and my career: turn what could be setbacks into challenges that can instead become positive triumphs,” Mr. Black said.

“Boxing kind of taught me that. It taught me composure. There’s a guy coming at you trying to take your head off; how do you deal with that? Of all the education that I’ve got, that sport taught me the most.”

dgeiger@observer.com