News
Chat with John Cushman
April 20, 2011
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| We always enjoy running into living legends (running into dead legends freaks us out), so our Houston reporter Catie Brubaker loved seeing Cushman & Wakefield chairman John Cushmanrecently. She snapped this dapper trio: Wolff Cos? David Wolff and Cushman & Wakefield twins John and Lou Cushman. David says John's competitiveness began when he and Lou were in the womb and he pushed his way out first. John's four sons are the seventh generation of Cushmans to work continuously in NYC real estate. (He calls real estate ?the genetic imbalance in the family.?) John coasted through high school but learned the value of working hard after receiving poor grades his freshman year of college. A memorable lesson, he used it in his early days as a tenant rep broker canvassing parts of the city nobody wanted, knocking on doors, repeatedly getting kicked out of buildings and locked in elevators by irritated property owners. Today he's still churning away, averaging 7,000 miles per week in the air for the past 38 years. |
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| John's career is full of highlights, like negotiating the largest office lease in the world, the 4M SF Merrill Lynch world HQ in Manhattan. But he says his favorite client was Atlantic Richfield, which treated him exceptionally well as a young broker. He opened C&W?s Los Angeles office in ?67 to manage the development of ARCO?s 2.6M SF office there. At the time, it was the most office space available for lease at one time in the world. His most exciting transaction, though, was moving Boeing?s HQ from Seattle to Chicago, which he did with Houston-based colleague Tim Relyea in ?01. Fun fact about John: After college, he ran a cement plant in the Spanish Riviera, then did a two-month expedition in the bush of Angola. |
