Colliers International has taken 18,000 square feet at 136 Madison Avenue, the building’s entire fifth floor.
Joe Caridi, an executive vice president at the firm who manages much of its midtown operations, said that Colliers was taking the space so that it can relocate and expand its property management operations from the firm’s current New York headquarters at 380 Madison Avenue.
In recent months, Colliers had been planning to add 8,000 square feet to its roughly 43,000 square foot office at 380 Madison in order to create room for growth. But by freeing up space at its existing offices at 380 Madison through the relocation, Caridi said that the firm no longer needs to add square footage there in order to grow its brokerage operations and other services such as project management, consulting, appraisals and its health care practice.
In a conversation last May to discuss the company’s recently arranged merger with Colliers International, Caridi said that the firm was planning to add brokers and other staff in a push to compete for market share with the city’s largest brokerage firms such as CB Richard Ellis, Cushman & Wakefield and Jones Lang LaSalle.
Before becoming Colliers, the firm, which began as the Williams Company, had gone through a succession of real estate service networks, including most recently First Service and GVA, which were arranged to provide it affiliations with real estate companies in other cities and give its business a national reach. Joining Colliers, Caridi said, gave it a more sweeping national and international presence.
“We want to grow all our service lines,” Caridi said. “We understand that to be a big player in Manhattan you need to have global reach and be able to offer all the services a company needs. Becoming part of Colliers International gives us that global reach.”
The Williams Company began as a real estate firm that owned and administered its own portfolio of commercial office buildings in Manhattan. Although the company’s brokers have long handled leasing deals outside its own holdings, top New York executives who spearheaded the merger with Colliers, Mark Jaccom and Robert Freedman, have segmented the company’s services business from the real estate interests held by principals at Williams in an effort to make the firm a more corporate operation.
136 Madison is owned by one of those men, Jerry Cohen, who is in his 80s and is one of the patriarchs of the Williams Company. Moving property management could also be part of this segmentation, relocating an operation that oversees the portfolio held by Cohen and other former Williams principals.