Mr. Berliner was not only good at getting the best out of his brokers but his unerring sense of fair play also made him a difficult man to argue with when brokers needed a higher up to settle a commission dispute, the kinds of sticky arguments that are part of the job for almost any manager in the brokerage business.
“Leadership has to flow from the top,” Mr. Berliner said. “To be a leader you have to set the example. Leadership for me has also been about doing business and living just the way I expect my brokers to.”
In the early 1990s, as Helmsley began to fall into decline as a brokerage power, Mr. Berliner pursued other opportunities in the real estate business, switching over to ownership. First he worked for the investor Bruce Brickman, then the investment firm Olmstead Properties.
He enjoyed the experiences, but he began to sense that his disposition wasn’t suited for it.
“I was with Brickman for two years and Olmstead for four years beyond that,” Mr. Berliner said. “I was at these firms in the mid to late 1990s when real estate prices started to shoot up. And they were going up so fast it scared me. When you buy a building for $10 million and sell it for $23 million 18 months later and then $35 million months after that, you start to wonder if you’re going to be able to get the rents to make it all work out. It was crazy and I began to ask myself, am I really an investor?”
In 1999, Mr. Berliner was offered what seemed like the perfect transition back to brokerage. Wanting to utilize his most recent credentials as a landlord, the services company Grubb & Ellis brought him on board to launch a New York leasing arm of the company that would focus on agency assignments.
The year he spent there was a low point in his career.
In a business and in life, Mr. Berliner prides himself on being a straight shooter. Grubb & Ellis, he alleges, quickly irked him by living up to few of the assurances he said it had promised. Still, Mr. Berliner didn’t want to discuss the particulars of his time at the company, and said only that he “waited until my one-year contract was up, then left.”
Though the period clearly offended his sense of right and wrong, Mr. Berliner doesn’t seem to get hung up on it. In his world view, someone lucky enough to be in a city of such boundless opportunity as New York in the present day really has little reason to complain, even if they are dealt a few setbacks.
“My mother and her mother and father were sent to Auschwitz,” Mr. Berliner said.
On his desk, he has a picture of the three of them together in Germany in the 1930s before World War II and the Holocaust. Mr. Berliner’s mother and grandmother made it out of the camp, but his grandfather didn’t.
“When I think about that, every day for me is a great day,” Mr. Berliner said. “I mean, what are we dealing with? Real estate deals. Compared to Auschwitz, the problems we have in life are nothing.”
Mr. Berliner quietly joined the real estate firms Insignia ESG and then GVA Williams (now known as Colliers International) after his quick stay at Grubb & Ellis. After rebuilding at these firms he was offered a job to come over to the tenant representation firm Studley and return to what he loves best: management. At Studley he now oversees the company’s Midtown operations. Mr. Berliner has been in the position for six years and imagines finishing his career at the firm, which is known as a feisty niche player in the market that, in recent years especially, has won outsize chunks of business for its modest size.
