Nate Brzozowski of Savills: 5 Questions

Nate Brzozowski has worked on many of Savills’ notable leasing transactions over the past decade, but from a different side of the table.

Alongside Matthew Barlow and Brad Wolk, Brzozowski leads Savills’ Integrated Consulting Strategies (ICS) team, a specialized group within the larger real estate services firm that provides corporate advisory and financial planning before a deal is even pitched.

According to Brzozowski, his work comes in “at the very beginning,” when he makes sure each party is informed about a deal and has the best financial strategy to move forward with it. In other words, his job is to give Savills’ brokers “an unfair advantage” when they start working on an account, Brzozowski said.

Commercial Observer sat down with Brzozowski last week to discuss his work on the Savills ICS team, how the merger with Eastdil Secured has benefited the business, and why his background in health care and private equity gives him a leg up in his work now.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: Tell me about Savills ICS. What is your role, and how are you involved in the deal-making process?

Nate Brzozowski: I would call ICS the strategy and analytics engine behind a lot of Savills’ biggest and most complicated occupier deals. 

It’s a team that I lead with my partners Matthew Barlow and Brad Wolk, and it brings investment-grade financial analysis to the occupier side of the table. We’re the team that makes the occupier the most informed party in the room, whether a half-million-square-foot headquarters in Midtown or a health care system’s regional ambulatory network. 

Behind the three partners is a 10-person team of seasoned consultants and analysts, so every assignment gets senior attention and real technical expertise.

I’m a strong believer that Savills has some of the best brokers in the business. Our job is to give them an unfair advantage when they go out to compete to get these accounts. We partner with the brokers early. We help build sophisticated finance and business strategies for a target or for a client. We help them secure or continue the business, and then we sit at the table through execution to make sure all of that strategy, all of the financial engineering that we’re doing on the front end, makes it through to a document, whether it’s a lease, a purchase and sale agreement, what have you. 

So we really come in at the very beginning. We joke that the bulk of our value is imparted before there’s even a pitch for a prospect because we’re doing so much legwork up front to make sure that the narrative is correct, to make sure that we’ve started to run some scenarios, started to think outside the box about different ways we can be accretive to that specific company’s bottom line.

Do you only work on the tenant side of these deals?

It’s interesting. Because we’re in a world now where so many of our clients own assets, we refer to it more as an occupier, simply because so many large clients either own their office space or they own a warehouse or they may be disposing of space that they master-lease. So the line blurs a little bit. That’s why the new term is really occupier focused.

We were born and bred being a tenacious tenant advocate in New York City, but understanding the changing landscape and things happening in the capital markets, it’s really “occupier.”

What recent deals have you worked on, and in which industries?

Honestly, every industry. Our home turf is large headquarters deals in the Northeast and in Manhattan, but they represent every different potential industry. We’ve got a lot of fashion. We have tech. We have a very significant law firm resume. A lot of financial institutions, private equity. Really, if they’re a sizable user in Manhattan, we’ve got clients in that arena.

We’re currently working on about a half dozen transactions, tenant rep transactions, over 300,000 square feet, but, because they’re in flight, I can’t disclose what’s going on there. 

The most recent large one would probably be American Eagle. That was a significant headquarters expansion and relocation to 63 Madison Avenue. That was 340,000 square feet, and it’s expanded since then.

That was a classic case of a really strong broker who had a relationship and was looking for the right value add. We did a lot of work on the front end there, building out an interesting business case. At the end of the day, the stars aligned, and it was a strategy that was a winner for the client and resulted in a very large new headquarters transaction. 

How has the merger with Eastdil Secured affected your work?

Our recent billion-dollar merger with Eastdil Secured has only strengthened us. It’s brought so many different avenues for collaboration, and it’s a nice complement because it really expands our historical MO, which is to take potentially what could be a basic lease negotiation and turn it into more of a capital markets discussion. 

It’s been such a natural fit for us because Eastdil is the best at what they do, and we really, as an organization in the United States, were not doing a lot of what they were doing in terms of the large capital markets presence, the investment bank angle, the ability to access and syndicate debt for clients. Those were spots where we really appreciate now having that capability.

They’re not so much on the leasing transactional side, which is the primary part of our transaction business. So it was really a nice complementary addition. There was very little overlap between the skill sets, and I think it’s just made our offering that much more attractive to to users because, again, you have investment-grade credit in some of these tenant assignments that can be leveraged into really interesting structures and sources of capital to make deals happen that might just not conform to a standard lease agreement.

We have four or five deals in flight that we’re partnering with Eastdil on, which are going to basically have a capital markets component. So, again, tremendously accretive, and I think it’s going to be a source of open and free collaboration going forward.

You also have a background in health care and in private equity. How does that experience help your work now?

Health care has always been near and dear to me. I just have happened through my career to do a lot of different health care transactions, and one of the initiatives that I took when I came to Savills was to start our national health care practice group, so that we could provide a lot of the consultative and analytical value to these health care systems, because there was a void that I saw. I’m really proud of it. It’s a true nationwide platform where we’re winning large accounts and running large health care systems’ portfolios, providing strategy, providing portfolio administration. 

And it’s exciting because health care is an industry that represents 18 to 19 percent of GDP for the country. So it’s a great place to be, and it’s meaningful work too. You’re working with systems that are actively trying to improve people’s lives, make people healthy.

Very few folks started out in real estate or came out of college like, “I’m gonna be a broker.” We all kind of fell into it. I actually got my undergraduate degree in architecture, and I thought I was going to be an architect. And then at the end of four years, I was like, “I don’t want to be an architect.” And then I wound up going the private equity route. 

I was steered that way by some wise advice. It happened to be real estate private equity firm Normandy, and it was really interesting to be on that side of the business initially. My first exposure to this was the ownership side. What really happened is I spent my early career figuring out what an occupant — a tenant or an occupier — was worth to a building, and now I make sure that the occupier knows that number before the landlord does.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.