Mary Ann Tighe
CEO of the New York tri-state region at CBRE
Last year's rank: 15
For Mary Ann Tighe, the perennial top producer at CBRE New York, the lull in activity for much of 2022 turned into an avalanche of activity before New Year’s Day. Tighe ended the year as CBRE’s No. 1 office leasing broker across the vast firm and the No. 1 broker in New York.
“I had, weirdly, one of the biggest years, if not the biggest year in my career in terms of transaction work,” Tighe said. “It came very unexpectedly because most deals came in the fourth quarter of the year. Nothing seems normative right now, so it’s very hard to read the landscape.”
The deals which launched Tighe’s 2022 into the stratosphere were a pair of office leases.
First, there was the surprise decision by Rupert Murdoch to keep Fox Corporation and News Corp. headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, a lease which had been thrown into confusion following the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney in 2019 and the hybrid work wave that swept office spaces beginning in 2020. But Murdoch maintained a commitment to 1211 Avenue of the Americas, paving the way for Tighe to broker a 1.2 million-square-foot lease extension into 2042.
Representing Fox Corporation and News Corp., Tighe corralled property manager Hines, broker Cushman & Wakefield, the New York City Department of Buildings, and architects Kohn Pedersen Fox to ensure necessary building upgrades to solidify the deal.
“That was a furious pace of negotiation,” Tighe said. “As much as we enjoy real estate, sometimes the people who use the real estate just make a decision and act.”
The deal closed on Dec. 31, just in time for Tighe to enjoy her New Year’s toast.
She also secured a 180,000-square-foot lease for law firm Freshfields at 3 World Trade Center, bringing the building to 90 percent occupancy. Once again Tighe represented the building owner, Silverstein Properties.
“The people who best get the World Trade Center are global companies. It’s not an accident that Freshfields is headquartered in England,” Tighe explained. “If you take a look at many of the major tenants — WPP plc [is from] London, Spotify [is from] Stockholm — it’s as if they know the value of the World Trade Center site in terms of connectivity to airports and its connectivity to the region.”
