There are two names that are consistently mentioned in New York real estate. Two names that are synonymous with the biggest, flashiest, most influential deals that have been done in the Big Apple over the past two decades. Influential deals that continue to be done today.
Refreshingly, those two names are female – Mary Ann Tighe and Darcy Stacom.
The respect levelled at these women by their peers, clients and even the New York press is largely unheard of in the boys’ club of commercial property. Rarely are women talked about consistently in this way in UK real estate circles.
The UK does have its powerful women in high positions, of course – British Property Federation chief executive Liz Peace, UK Regeneration’s Jackie Sadek, CBRE’s Emma Crawford, Knight Frank’s Emma Goodford and the late Karen Queen – but Tighe and Stacom are mentioned in pretty much every conversation you have about real estate in the city.
Scare tactics?
When EG first meets Tighe, something is not working. Something has not been set up as she wanted it set up. Uh oh. Diva alert. Is New York’s most powerful woman about to kick off? Has this woman made it to the top of a man’s world because she is ever so slightly scary? The answer, thankfully, is no. Tighe is calm and politely and slowly – and with a smile – asks for the problem to be sorted. Please. You then realise why this woman has done so well. You want to do what she asks.
Tighe, right, started out as a history teacher. In the 1970s, she was an adviser to US vice-president Walter Mondale before moving into television, eventually becoming a vice-president at ABC and setting up the A&E Network. It was her negotiating skills there that led to the suggestion that she should get into real estate. She hasn’t looked back for almost three decades.
Tighe’s real estate career began at the Edward S Gordon Company. She worked hard, rising up the ranks to become vice-chairman of Insignia/ESG. She has been chief executive of the New York ?tri-state area at CBRE since 2002, taking command of more than 2,000 employees.
Speak to any of Tighe’s colleagues and they will tell you she is a destination-maker. They say she now only gets involved in deals that will change the face of New York City, but one wonders whether it might be the other way round. ?Do these deals become destination-makers because of Tighe’s involvement?
During her 28 years in the business, Tighe has been responsible for more than ?84m sq ft of transactions, including securing 11m sq ft of anchors for new construction around the city.
That includes two game-changing deals for publisher Condé Nast. In 1996, she took the publisher of magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair to Times Square, an area of Manhattan considered tawdry, an area of the city that Tighe’s client feared would not be attractive to its clients. The über-fashionable would not visit Times Square, it thought.
But Tighe knew best and Condé Nast’s move to Times Square was transformational, both for the publisher and for the redevelopment of the area.
And now, more than 15 years later, she’s done it again, taking Condé Nast to the world-famous One World Trade Center – the focal point of the redevelopment of the landmark towers destroyed by the 9/11 terror attacks. Condé Nast has agreed to take ?1m sq ft in the tower, trailblazing a renaissance of Downtown, expanding it beyond its traditional roots as a financial district.
More recently, Tighe has secured a new 740,000 sq ft headquarters for Coach, the luxury handbag retailer, at Hudson Yards – a $750m deal that enabled groundbreaking on an 18m sq ft project that is set to create a new destination in Manhattan.
Queen of Skyscrapers
Darcy Stacom, CBRE vice-chairman and all-round investment guru, right, is often mentioned in the same breath as Tighe. If a flagship deal has been done in New York, chances are Stacom did it. Her sister, Tara, is also in real estate, often going head-to-head with Tighe as a leasing agent at Cushman & Wakefield.
During her career, Stacom, with partner Bill Shanahan, has brokered more than $60bn of deals. She is known as the Queen of Skyscrapers, and deals include the $5.4bn sale of Peter Cooper Stuyvesant Town for Metropolitan Life and Google’s $1.8bn purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue, which was ranked among the top 10 New York deals done in 2010. Stacom, incidentally, was involved in nine of those 10 deals. More recently, she brokered the $725m sale of the 2.2m sq ft One Chase Manhattan Plaza to Chinese investor Fosun International.
Stacom is presently in the market looking for buyers for close to $1bn of property in the form of a trophy asset owned by Blackstone and let to Merrill Lynch/Bank of America and Island Capital at 717 Fifth Avenue and the original MGM building at 315 Avenue of the Americas, which comes with its own private cinema.
When you ask Stacom how much she has transacted this year, she shrugs and looks to her business partner, Shanahan. “Probably $5bn,” they say.
Stacom has a softer personality than Tighe, but draws you in with her friendly persona. She’s also a great story teller, recounting a tale from the lunch she has just been to with a room full of Asian billionaires. She talks like it is an everyday occurrence to deal with such vast sums of money.
Inspiration
When it comes to building a strong profile for females in the property industry, these two women are the role models to look up to.
In 2010, Tighe became the first female chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York in its 116-year history, and has won innumerable awards for her work in the industry. She has a group of followers, the MAT Club, which includes a growing number of powerful women in the real estate sector – including Samantha Rudin, vice-president of Rudin Management and a member of one of New York’s largest property dynasties, and Sarah Pontius, vice-president at Brookfield Properties – which meet regularly to discuss business and how to empower women in it.
Stacom also takes her role as a mentor seriously. She is an active member of CBRE’s Women’s Network, a group that started as an informal breakfast meeting of 35 women from across the US and now has 1,500 members worldwide.
She still thinks women are under-represented in the real estate world, but can see that more are making the attempt to push for success. She cites Wendy Silverstein, executive vice-president and co-head of acquisitions and capital markets at Vornado Realty Trust, as a major player in the property market who is helping to encourage more women into the sector.
“She has that level of influence, the calm, and wants to support other women in the industry,” says Stacom.
For Shanahan, being partnered with a woman is invaluable. He says women solve problems better.
Tighe adds that service businesses such as brokerage should reflect the customers they serve.
She says corporate America is becoming increasingly diversified, with women in top positions – IBM is led by chief executive Virginia Rometty, Xerox Corporation is run by Ursula Burns, and Irene Dorner is one of the most powerful people in finance as chairman and chief executive of HSBC America – and real estate should follow suit.
“It’s a lot easier to achieve success as a woman if you are in a firm that has women in powerful positions,” says Tighe. “There is one less barrier to success if there are already several women in that role.”
She quotes research that shows women are more likely to succeed in firms where at least 40% of the senior positions are held by women. She says that figure is certainly representative of CBRE in New York and of her experience.
Tighe chuckles as she recounts a recent negotiation for a client. Her team was made up of five women. In the talks, they sat opposite a bank of five men from the landlord’s team. The opening gambit from the landlord’s team was: “I think we are in trouble here.” And they were. Tighe’s all-female team negotiated a killer deal for its client.
Tough-minded
“New York real estate prides itself on being a contact sport,” says Tighe. “Negotiators ?cannot be soft, but women have their own style of being tough-minded.”
Tighe’s mentor when she started out in real estate was Carol Nelson, a senior manager at Edward S Gordon & Co. She says Nelson taught her that to succeed in business as a woman, you had to bring ideas and a valuable business proposition to the table and that it wasn’t always about being a good girl.
But Nelson liked to stay under the radar, whereas Tighe is comfortable in the limelight.
The advice Tighe now gives – ?for anyone wanting to succeed in business, male or female – is to become an expert.
She says: “Make yourself an expert at something. Anything. There is always some little area that is not fully developed or is emerging in a new way. If you make yourself an expert, business will find you. Business always rewards expertise.”
samantha.mcclary@estatesgazette.com
See also:
• Harrison LeFrak: New York Giant
