Nelson Mills and Jeff Gronning.
Nelson Mills and Jeff Gronning
President, CEO and Director; Executive Vice President and CIO at Columbia Property Trust
Last year's rank: 83
They say that two heads are better than one, and that’s exactly the wager that Columbia Property Trust made when it acquired Normandy Real Estate Management in January.
In the $100 million deal for Normandy, Columbia acquired the firm’s operating platform and real estate assets — including an interest in the Terminal Warehouse development in West Chelsea and 888 Broadway in Flatiron — while also bringing Normandy co-founder Jeff Gronning on board, where he now leads the firm’s investments.
“I’ve been asked the question a few times, ‘Knowing what you know now about COVID, would you have done it?’” said Nelson Mills, president, CEO and director at Columbia. “I would say, I’m more thankful and more grateful that we did it now than even before.” He pointed to the resulting team — broader, deeper, and more capable in its reach (“several of us on both teams have been through cycles before”) — as essential toward remaining competitive.
The acquisition also doubled Columbia’s portfolio under management to 16 million square feet while upping its exposure to tech- and media-friendly markets such as Midtown South and the West Side.
“We have one of the largest, most concentrated portfolios of boutique creative office space,” Gronning said. “I think that’s pretty powerful when you look at it.”
Columbia had an incredibly busy year.
There’s its work at 799 Broadway in the West Village, its first ground-up development project in New York City, where it just topped out and expects to deliver 180,000 square feet of boutique office space in April; its acquisition of 250 Church Street in Tribeca, which it plans to redevelop and rebrand into 101 Franklin Street; the task of marketing 115,000 square feet of space at 149 Madison Avenue, recently vacated by WeWork; as well as its work on an opportunity zone fund with investments in New Jersey and Maryland, among others.
Amid the coronavirus crisis, the firm has been focusing on safeguarding its offices in anticipation of tenants’ return. Meanwhile, rent collections have remained high, around 98 percent, with a small number of firms receiving short-term rent deferrals.
In the wake of the protests surrounding George Floyd’s death, Columbia has been focusing internally on ways to promote diversity and inclusion, forming an oversight committee and four internal working groups that are exploring everything from advancement opportunities to countering unconscious bias.
“We want our DNA to change, we want to be different,” Mills said. “As painful as it’s been for our society and for our team and all that, it’s been one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done as a company.”—S.G.
