Eat for Success! Trammell, Newmark, Brookfield ...and BLT Steak

Those nice folks from Trammell and Newmark let me see last week what a real estate closing dinner is like—although I was less a fly on the wall at BLT Steak than a vulture at the hors' d'oeuvres table.

Trammell's Tom Finan, third from left above, with colleague Scott Frankel, far left, hosted the occasion to celebrate the lease of 54k feet at 777 6th Street by lead tenant law firm Cooley Godward Kronish, represented by Newmark's Aaron Katz, second from left, and Pat Nalls, far right. (Gotta' remember to add that "Kronish," folks: it's a 110 lawyer NYC firm Cooley merged with in October.)

The 190k SF building co-owned by the Trammell development/investment wing of CB (thus the continuing use of the Trammell name) will be finished in May, with Cooley moving in by August. Negotiations started last August and a lease was fully executed just after Thanksgiving.

The dinner was significant enough to draw attendance from Cooley's Palo Alto-based COO Mark Pitchford and Executive Director Dick Bradshaw, third and second from right. Pitchford told me he's originally from Chevy Chase and is in California now because he went to Stanford on a basketball scholarship—could be why he's the tallest one in the picture.

By coincidence, Trammell developed 1625 I Street, where BLT Steak opened in November. But they sold the building to Brookfield three years ago, and so it was also at BLT where I met up with Brookfield's regional head Paul Schulman, above right, for a recent lunch. With him is restaurant GM Adam Williamowsky.

Have you ever seen such a friendly landlord and tenant? Maybe that's because Adam loves Paul's repeat business; and Paul, of course, loves the rents.

For our part, we love the hanger steak. No, it does not get its name because BLT has become quite the "hangout" for real estate types, but because (true fact) it comes from the part of the cow that "hangs" between the rib and the loin. Okay, okay: too much information.