Linda Foggie

For Linda Foggie, it’s been a whirlwind.

She had spent two years as an executive vice president at Turner & Townsend, a firm that guides clients through the ins and outs of owning commercial real estate, when Citigroup came calling toward the end of 2021. The financial giant was looking for a managing director and a global head of real estate, a position that now gives Foggie oversight of Citigroup’s footprint in about 100 countries.

“Our portfolio is quite diverse,” she said. “It’s a hyper-global portfolio that supports our businesses in all those different markets. I get to look after a number of different functions. I handle all our design and construction services. We build new buildings and we renovate existing buildings. We also handle all the facilities management, so we operate the buildings as well.”

Those include Citi’s headquarters campus in Manhattan, at 388 and 390 Greenwich Street in Tribeca, which Citi inherited as part of the years-ago acquisition of Travelers Insurance. The towers famously had a Travelers’ umbrella on the side in red lights familiar to West Street drivers for years.

Having served in a similar capacity at Wells Fargo before going to Turner & Townsend in 2020, Foggie was familiar with the space needs of a large multinational bank — though nothing prepared her for COVID-19 and the revolution in banking that it created. After more than a year of staff working from home, Citi employees in New York are back to working two days a week from the office, with about 90 percent coming in on that basis.

“We have our people back in a hybrid mode,” she said. “And we believe that, going forward, that’s the way we’re going to operate. We do see the importance and the value of being together in person. We’re really focused on what people’s [workplace] experience is.”