Meet C&W's New US Property Management Head

Yesterday, Cushman & Wakefield announced Michael Prabhu as the firm’s US head of property management, where he’ll be responsible for growing the service line’s business (C&W currently manages over 450M SF in the US and over 1B SF worldwide). He joins from JLL and was previously Staubach COO for the LA region before the firms merged. Michael (snapped with wife and kids) wasn’t supposed to be in real estate. At the University of California Davis, he majored in poli sci and became a lawyer. “Then I found out I wasn’t so good at it,” he tells us. The legal industry’s loss was commercial real estate’s gain—family connections landed him a job in financial analysis and building engineering for Heitman, which eventually blossomed into a property management career.

Real estate’s a family affair for Michael, who'll be based out of the firm's Downtown Los Angeles office—his father, the late Matti Prabhu, was a well-known building structural engineer whose work prevented LA’s Aon Center from collapsing in its infamous 1988 fire; older brother John is president of Kennedy Wilson’s commercial investment business. It’s yet to be seen if his 16-year-old son Dylan, a junior in high school, will follow in his footsteps; his 26-year-old daughter Dani is a private school teacher. Michael, wife Terri, and the kids recently went to Paris for 10 days to celebrate Terri’s 50th birthday. They love to travel, spending time in Hawaii every year and taking an annual white-water rafting trip.