Liz Lash, 29
Vice president at CBRE
Liz Lash had no experience in commercial real estate until CBRE’s Wheel program rolled up.
“I knew nothing about commercial real estate to the point where I was Googling ‘commercial real estate’ when I was looking for jobs,” she said.
The Duke University student leveraged contacts from growing up in Westchester County to land a spot in the coveted one-year program that rotates its initiates through different aspects of real estate brokerage. From there, Lash earned a job at CBRE in 2016, and advanced to her current role in 2021 advising and representing tenants and landlords.
Lash works across all industries, and hers is a relationship business internally and externally. The idea is to build contacts and opportunities for both clients and CBRE until a symbiosis grows between the two. “That’s where the true value comes for all of us,” she said.
Case in point: Lash worked with design firm Huge starting in 2018 to site a new headquarters in what became one of the largest Brooklyn office leases in 2022. The company — born and bred in Dumbo — had paused its search during the pandemic. It picked back up with it in the summer of 2021. By then, Huge had a new CEO, and companies in general were starting to return to the office.
“The combination of the two motivated them to find a new location that would excite their employees and reinvigorate the Huge brand,” Lash said.
Enter Dock 72, the highly amenitized, buzzy Brooklyn Navy Yard development from Rudin Management and Boston Properties. Huge signed there in September for 72,000 rentable square feet for 10 years.
In a way, too, the deal underscored a trend that Lash has seen in her many, many meetings of late. Companies want top-shelf space like Dock 72 as a means of drawing workers back to the office — or drawing workers, period, to their firms. “For the past two and a half years, it’s been recruitment- and retention-focused,” Lash said of the office market.
Speaking of retention, Lash, who benefited so much from CBRE’s Wheel program, is paying it forward in mentorship through that program and through the brokerage’s Tri-State Women’s Network. She’s on the board of that. —T.A.
