Mary Clayton.
Mary Clayton, 28
Director at Cushman & Wakefield
Mary Clayton had an interest in real estate when she was five years old. She remembers discussing new development and architecture with her father in their hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. By the end of her time at Duke University 15-plus years later, she had zeroed in on the commercial side of it as a career.
“I loved the tangibility of real estate, something that I still do,” Clayton told CO. “After an internship in finance my junior summer, I reverted to my roots.”
Luckily, Cushman & Wakefield (CWK) happened to be recruiting at Duke for a year-long program that rotates participants through the brokerage’s various departments, and Clayton opted to apply. Five years into working at the firm — and following that rotation program — Clayton is a director at Cushman & Wakefield specializing in tenant and landlord representation on the retail side. The team she’s on includes senior partner Joanne Podell.
Her clients have included TD Bank, Ethan Allen, Nike, Lazaro and the Luxottica stable of brands, which includes Ray Ban, Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters.
Some of Clayton’s biggest deals have involved these brands, including helping negotiate Nike’s 60,000-square-foot flagship at 650 Fifth Avenue and growing Luxottica’s Manhattan portfolio to 50 stores. Her biggest deals in the past 12 months have included representing landlord Empire State Realty Trust in a 23,000-square-foot Starbucks Reserve store at the Empire State Building, and landlord Midtown Equities in a 4,000-square-foot lease with luxury watch retailer Tourneau at 33 Ninth Avenue.
As one might expect, closing such deals even in the best of times is no mean feat given the challenges that brick-and-mortar stores face. But Clayton has grown adept at measuring what works now and what, therefore, might work down the foggy road.
“Following a similar trend as ’20, activity will be driven from a further increase in shorter-term transactions, new concepts surfacing, and other categories strengthening amidst circumstances,” Clayton said in a response to a question about conditions in 2021. “If we’re able to get our office workers and residents back, there will be a dramatic market improvement from there.”
