JLL’s Paul Glickman Leans Into the Social Side of Commercial Real Estate

Paul Glickman knows real estate is a social business. 

On any day of the work week, the 63-year-old vice chairman and international director at JLL’s New York office, whose primary focus is landlord leasing, can be found working the phone, catching up with owners like RXR and Brookfield; taking clients to lunch and dinner; mentoring junior brokers over coffee; and even conducting tenant walk-throughs, a chore that other brokers of his caliber might farm out. He says he does it to “hear what the tenants are saying, to observe how a building is being presented.” 

For Glickman, it’s all worthy of his time. It’s gathering information that helps him to position himself as one of the leading brokers working with landlords in Manhattan, and to better market buildings that might otherwise falter in grabbing tenant attention as the COVID-era flight to quality continues. 

“Part of being a good landlord agent is looking at a building through a new lens, trying to be creative in how you position that asset, trying to be creative in how you differentiate that asset from what’s on the marketplace,” Glickman said. 

It’s this attention that has won him the praise of colleagues who have worked with Glickman over his decade and a half at JLL.

“He’s one of those guys that just always is in the thick of it,” Craig Panzirer, senior vice president and director of leasing at owner Global Holdings Management Group, who counts Glickman as a friend, told Commercial Observer. “Some people have it and some people don’t, and he has it.”

Go-getter

Glickman has long been entrepreneurial. Growing up in Westfield, N.J., he quickly realized that he’d rather set his own work agenda than labor for an hourly wage at the local supermarket, like other kids his age. He used the family lawn mower to start a landscaping business and took that enterprising spirit to Tufts University in the Boston area, where he graduated in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. 

In his senior year at Tufts, Glickman and his roommate, whose family was in residential real estate, pitched a work-study program helping upperclassmen land in off-campus
housing. He and his roommate got their Massachusetts real estate licenses and started Jumbo Rentals, named after Tufts’ elephant mascot. 

At college, Glickman was also the social chairman of fraternity Psi Upsilon, a role that required a flair for marketing and bringing people together. A fraternity brother he caught up with one homecoming worked in commercial real estate in Boston and told Glickman that it was “such a great career.” 

“That was the seed that got planted,” Glickman told CO, speaking on Google Meet from Longboat Key, Fla., 1,250 miles from his home in Chappaqua, N.Y. Glickman was visiting family but still displaying a New Yorker’s sensibility in a black T-shirt and black-rimmed glasses. 

He already had the client relations part of the business down, after his stint growing, marketing and connecting with landlords in the Boston area through Jumbo Rentals. It was time to level up.

“I came down to New York City, interviewed with 15 firms, and got 15 offers,” he said

It’s not because he was so impressive, Glickman joked, but because it was a time before agents and brokers were salaried. “If you had a gray suit, a maroon tie and a pair of lace-up black shoes, you were in, because they weren’t risking much on hiring people,” he said.

Glickman started his career with Pearce, Urstadt, Mayer & Greer Realty doing commercial office leasing in 1984. In his mid-20s, he and a few colleagues spun off and started Riverbank Realty, which merged with Galbreath Company to become Galbreath Riverbank in 1992. Glickman left the company in 1997 to join Cushman & Wakefield, where he worked for 15 years in commercial leasing before being recruited to join JLL by Peter Riguardi, chairman and president of the company’s New York tri-state operations. 

Master of the deal

At JLL, Glickman co-heads the landlord agency specialty and has had a hand in orchestrating some of the largest and most complex leasing transactions in Manhattan over the past decade. Recent deals include an 11-year lease extension for Bloomberg on nearly 496,000 square feet at Global Holdings’ 120 Park Avenue, a 15-year lease for Amazon on 330,000 square feet at Global Holdings’ 10 Bryant Park, and relocating the FDIC from the Empire State Building to about 147,000 square feet at EJM Equities’ 1166 Avenue of the Americas. 

Glickman also recently worked with SL Green, New York City’s largest office landlord, on the $2 billion repositioning and leasing of One Madison Avenue at the corner of East 23rd Street and Madison Avenue — not to be confused with One Madison, the nearby residential condominium — in which the building’s core was demolished and a new Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed glass tower was nested in the existing base. The repositioning brought new inventory and large floor plates to an area where that’s practically unheard of, but it also debuted at a time when technology tenants, which the building was ideal for, were pulling out of the marketplace.

“It took, I think, a much larger effort to work the marketplace, reach out to tenants that may not be thinking of this location,” said Steven Durels, executive vice president and director of leasing and real property at SL Green. 

Glickman was dogged in his efforts to represent One Madison Avenue, he said, with Franklin Templeton Investments being one of the first anchor tenants to sign on for about 347,000 square feet alongside IBM’s initial 328,000. Both deals were sealed in 2022.

As SL Green continued the build-out, it announced high-scale, noteworthy amenities like the Daniel Boulud restaurant Le Tete d’Or and catering by the chef at the building’s event space and rooftop garden. The building also has a 60,000-square-foot Chelsea Piers Fitness facility. 

IBM inked a deal for an additional 93,000-square-foot floor plate at the end of 2025, bringing its presence in the building to 363,000 square feet. Glickman also worked as SL Green’s representative bringing crypto exchange Coinbase, sports betting platform FanDuel and professional services portal Harvey AI into the building.

“He’s not just one of those guys that fills space,” Durels said. “He really sets out with a deep understanding of what our goals and objectives are for any particular asset.”

The case of One Madison Avenue speaks directly to what Glickman said is driving the office market from both the owner and tenant side: the COVID-era necessity for a building to be a platform “to recruit talent, retain talent and make the office as productive as possible” through amenities and meaningfully placed common space. This flight to quality is still driving the market, with landlords snatching up developable lots and racing to get in the ground. 

For existing inventory, it isn’t only the biggest deals driving the market. What Glickman said is equally meaningful but less seen in the media is the steady flow of smaller renewals and expansions happening every day. 

“I think that’s the real sign of confidence in New York City,” he said. “That kind of consistent, organic growth is what’s quietly tightening the marketplace, especially when it comes to the best space.”

According to data from JLL, Manhattan’s office availability rate — a measure of vacant and soon-to-be-vacant space — fell to 13.4 percent in February, the lowest rate seen since the third quarter of 2019. With just 4.1 million square feet of new space under development, the company expects supply to remain tight over the next few years as pre-leasing of the new space removes square footage from the pipeline.

A mentor at work

As part of JLL’s executive management committee for the New York tri-state region, Glickman helps support the efforts of the New York office. He praises Riguardi’s leadership style and the collaborative environment that he said has flourished under Riguardi’s tenure. He attributes this partly to the company’s focus on hiring teams across different service lines — like bringing David Carlos, who specializes in nonprofit space, over from Savills in 2023 — and how that keeps brokers from having to compete with one another for the same business.

“There’s healthy competition, then there’s unhealthy competition,” Glickman said. “We’ve created healthy competition with the diversity of the people we brought in.”

The company continues to hire people from its summer internship and apprenticeship programs and bring in new talent lured by the company’s growth and what it has described as a continuous focus on innovation, including the use of AI-driven tools for brokers. 

Glickman cautions younger brokers against hiding behind technology, however. “Get out, meet people, network,” he said. “This is still a people business. It’s always going to be a people business.”

He added, “You still need to have a great network and access to information that you can’t just get on the internet, that you get through the human touch.”

Panzirer, from Global Holdings, vouched for Glickman’s own personable qualities. Glickman has recommended travel destinations to Panzirer and has had champagne waiting upon his arrival, Panzirer said. One year, Glickman, his wife Debby and their three sons stopped to visit with Panzirer’s family on Thanksgiving en route to their own celebration.

Glickman has a gravity to him that extends to his work in the community. He’s on the board of trustees for Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City and has, since 1990, chaired the organization’s real estate industry event, Casino Jazz Night, every November at Cipriani in Midtown. Over the past 25 years, he said, he’s helped raise over $45 million for the organization. (Panzirer was an honoree last year, and Durels is an event co-chair.)

In the rare times when Glickman isn’t networking, he’s truly disconnected. He’s an avid road biker, and has traveled with his family to cycle Ireland’s Connemara region and through the Swiss Alps. He’s also taken up boating over the past decade. It’s cathartic being on the water and it helps him clear his head for the week — and, of course, the deals — to come.