Page 38 - BusinessWest May 27, 2024

“Firms are creating opportunities for people to work
at home, and
that has certainly created some shifts in the office market.”
tinues to work to fill remaining vacancies in the sprawling complex.
“We had a great year last year — we brought on the Department of Developmental Services with a lease for just under 30,000 square feet for 10 years,” he said, add- ing that the state agency and other signed tenants now fill most of the 55,000 square feet once occupied by Liberty Mutual.
Meanwhile, the R.J Greeley Co. continues to respond to changes and trends within the market — everything from growing inventories on the office side of the ledger (a byproduct of remote work and hybrid schedules at busi- nesses in virtually every sector) to an extreme tightening of the industrial and distribution markets, a byproduct of rising interest rates that have produced an environment in which it is far more advantageous to buy or lease than build new.
For this issue and its focus on commercial real estate, BusinessWest talked with Greeley about the market and what the future might bring, and about what might come next for the company that was started by his father and still bears his initials, but is now being steered by his youngest child.
Right Place and Time
As he talked about his time with the company, and especially about life in a family business, Greeley spoke for everyone who has ever had that experience when he said, “it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, that’s for sure.”
Elaborating, he described his father as a great real- estate broker, teacher, and mentor — “I wish I had his ability to mentor people and bring them along” — but not the easiest person to work with or for, and someone who didn’t think much about succession planning, didn’t really want to think about it, and did so only when the matter
was pressed.
Indeed, when asked when his father first started talking
to him about succession planning, Greeley laughed and said, “never.”
“That was a painful process,” he recalled. “Succession planning was really hard for him. He never really thought about wanting to retire, it seems, and he was pretty reluc- tant to think about it.”
So much so that Greeley admitted to thinking about perhaps doing something else because of that reluctance.
“I had to impose some timelines to move things
along,” he went on. Eventually, a successful transition was achieved, made easier by some very strong years leading to that changing of hands, punctuated by the brokered sale of the former Westinghouse property to one of the players trying to bring a casino to Springfield.
Flashing back further, Greeley recalled that, as he entered the business, he certainly learned a lot from his father, especially when it came to the all-important work of getting in front of people building and maintaining rela- tionships — duties that he referred to collectively as the “grunt work.”
“Those first few years, I was going out and getting to know people,” he told BusinessWest. “My father always impressed upon me, from the beginning, that you have to go out and establish your network, the people you’re going to be doing business with — the people, as my father used to say, that you’re going to be in the trenches with.
“So the first few years were filled with inserting myself into circles of attorneys, accountants, bankers, insurance people — those we work with often — and just making friends with them and creating a network,” he went on.
“There was a lot of driving around, pulling up to busi- nesses, knocking on doors and saying, ‘I’m Brendan Gree- ley with the R.J. Greeley Co. — I just want to let you know
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