The Commercial Observer: It sounds like you’ve been pretty busy.
Mr. Jaccom: I gotta tell you! The phone is ringing off the goddarn hook, from CB to Jones Lang to Cushman brokers to every adviser and consultant. Now that we’re the third largest in the world and we have this pedigreed name, they’re just coming out of the woodwork.
What are they calling about? Jobs?
Guys have a fourth place to consider. Cushman, they feel is kind of, in their own way, imploding, and a lot of these guys work for big senior guys. And they’re senior guys, but they can’t break out there. And they see our platform. They see basically that we just got three guys from Cushman & Wakefield in our appraisal group. We just got a guy from Studley-their lead project manager-this guy Frank Edwards. He was an ex-Goldman Sachs guy. And I just shook hands with my project management group in Canada. So they’re seeing a company that is evolving as a fourth choice.
You sound like you’re on top of the world.
I mean, look at it: out of nowhere … I mean, Williams is a good family business. It has a good market share, but now FirstService is rebranding all of their companies to Colliers (CIGI) International-Colliers International Property Management, Colliers International Appraisal, Colliers International Hospitality. I mean, most people are cutting back; we’re gonna go from 42,000 to 70,000 [square feet in our Manhattan headquarters]. We’re growing.
I spoke to you three months ago. How far along was this merger when last we met?
What happened was when I spoke to you three months ago, we had a choice as a firm to rebrand the entire world of FirstService or get the Colliers name. Obviously, my choice is the Colliers name. So what did FirstService do? They bought London, they bought the Netherlands. So I knew what was happening; I just couldn’t divulge it because we had a lot of conflicts and legal matters.
