Francesco DeCamilli.
Francesco DeCamilli, 29
Vice president of flexible workspace at Colliers International
Commercial Observer is not necessarily in the habit of honoring former competitors, but we have to make an exception for Bisnow’s former chief operating officer Francesco DeCamilli.
Fresh out of Yale with a degree in economics, DeCamilli was introduced to Mark Bisnow, who was looking to build up his eponymous newsletter and events platform.
“In retrospect, it was the best thing for me,” DeCamilli, who is now a vice president of flex office space at Colliers (CIGI) International, told CO. “It was growing fast, but really under the radar. I built the operational backbone of the business as we launched new markets. There really was a great opportunity to drive the company.”
Six and a half years later, DeCamilli was COO when private equity firm Wicks Group bought the company, and he decided to strike out in the world of flex real estate. DeCamilli served as head of customer acquisition at Knotel before being offered a vice presidency at Colliers in its flexible workspace division.
“The role really sounded like a rare opportunity to define and build a new practice,” said DeCamilli, who lives in Brooklyn with his fiancee (another Yale alum). “It meant great access to working with Fortune 500 companies, to finance, to help our enterprise clients to tap into flex space.”
It’s DeCamilli’s job to sort through the hundreds of providers and direct Colliers tenants to the space that made the most sense. And while the WeWorks of real estate might have been overextended and reeling from the current crisis, DeCamilli doesn’t believe that flex space is going to be any less important in the future; quite the contrary.
“I think professionally, ironically, in many ways [COVID-19] accelerated a lot of my work product at Colliers,” DeCamilli said. “The industry was a bit dormant, but I think flex as a category is going to be a higher and higher priority for clients.
“Clients have an aversion to signing a long-term lease and they have a limited budget — they don’t want to spend on expensive buildout — and the preferred near-term option,” he added, is flex.
During the first three months of the pandemic, business very much dried up; however, “in the last 30 days, since Labor Day, there’s been a huge pickup — there’s this notion that people have to get back to work!”
