Veteran New York broker Aron Schreier has joined tenant-focused real estate services firm Cresa.
Schreier, a 26-year industry veteran who was most recently with Cushman & Wakefield, is now working as a principal at Cresa’s New York office, Cresa told CoStar News. His focus is to build the firm’s platform and position in the country’s largest commercial property market, the company said.
Schreier, whose history as a broker has primarily revolved around representing tenants, said Cresa’s focus on representing occupiers is one of the things that attracted him to the firm.
“I’ve never been with a company that all they want to do is represent tenants,” he said in an interview. “That’s really exciting to me.”
With firms that do business with both landlords and occupiers, tenants “have been in a situation where they feel there’s been conflicts of interest,” Schreier said. “That conflict is important to a lot of companies. I’ve lost business because the firm represented both a tenant and landlord. ... Cresa has a good presence in New York.
“There’s a major opportunity to grow significantly. The culture and singular focus around representing tenants is really unique.”
A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst who majored in political science, Schreier said his interest in learning about different businesses and organizations led him to gravitate toward representing many major international financial institutions, including Swedish bank SEB and Brazil’s Banco do Brasil. He’s negotiated over 50 deals and hundreds of thousands of square feet of leases in New York on behalf of international financial services firms alone, according to Cresa.
Early stages of growth
“We are at the very early stages of exponential growth of our New York platform, with similar momentum building across the U.S.,” said Michael Morris, co-leader of Cresa’s New York office, in a statement. “In addition to bringing unmatched energy, Aron is a top business development trainer in the industry, with a strong history of success mentoring executives.”
Just three weeks into his job at Cresa, Schreier also found it “really refreshing” when “so many people want to collaborate and work together,” pointing to an example of him working with five different brokers to “figure out ways to build business together.”
“That would never happen at a traditional real estate company,” he told CoStar News, describing Cresa’s culture as “entrepreneurial.”
Expanding Cresa’s business and positioning it as “the go-to occupier rep firm” in New York won’t be Schreier’s only focus at Cresa.
With “a proven record of mentoring and training hundreds of commercial real estate professionals,” the firm said, he also will help guide Cresa’s entry-level and emerging brokers both in New York and around the country.
“That’s my passion,” said Schreier, a Stamford, Connecticut, native. He added that he benefited from having a boss who helped him when he started. “Wonderful things start to happen” from those types of relationships, he said.
Teaching is also in Schreier’s blood. His mother was an elementary school teacher for 40 years.