Hustling Broker

John Dowling, the top office-space broker at Cushman & Wakefield Inc., hunches forward in his office chair at a tense moment and exhales cigarette smoke against the back of his teeth.

A major oil company believes it is being overcharged $650,000 by a Sun Belt real estate developer for construction of a new skyscraper the oil company plans to occupy. The developer is threatening to halt work on the building if the oil company doesn’t pay. Over Mr. Dowling’s speaker phone crackles the agitated voice of an oil company lawyer: “He can jump in a lake.”

Mr. Dowling originally negotiated the skyscraper lease for the oil firm, and today he is trying to settle this dispute by telephone. Corporations hire him to obtain big blocks of office space on the best possible terms. On their behalf he grapples with the wiliest landlords in the country over such arcane matters as porters’ wages and elevator charges.

He assures the lawyer that he has an extra hold over the landlord in this situation. By coincidence, another client is considering renting space in the same skyscraper, and Mr. Dowling thinks the developer will be more accommodating in hopes of landing the other tenant. “I’m using some other people’s leverage to your advantage,” he tells the lawyer. Eventually the dispute is resolved to the oil company’s satisfaction, after the second client does in fact choose the same building.

Mr. Dowling is one of the two or three superstars in office leasing, the most lucrative part of the business.

Sources in the industry say that his annual income consistently reaches the low to middle seven figures.

Mr. Dowling combines the skills of supersalesman and tough negotiator. He views his job as a profession, akin to law or accounting, and he pursues it with brains, high energy, experience, fast footwork, a dominating personality and a razor wit.

HAS TO HUSTLE NOW

Nowadays, Mr. Dowling has to hustle harder than usual for business because companies that were battered by the recession are still cautious about making new office commitments. He argues, however, that the present glut of space offers bargain rents that will vanish once demand picks up.

In seeking clients, he has successfully targeted growing industries, such as oil in the late 1970’s and, lately, financial services and telecommunications.

Harold Hicks, the manager of building and office services for Gulf Oil, calls Mr. Dowling “the finest real-estate broker in the United States.” The manager of General Electric Co.’s real-estate operations, Edward J. McCaffery, calls him “the most outstanding individual that I know in office leasing.” A landlord complains, “He has a lot of Fortune 500 companies wrapped around his little finger.

FATHERS DEATH

Mr. Dowling says that one key to his success is the fact that his father, a lawyer, died of a hart attack at age 45, leaving his wife without a nest egg or insurance to raise five boys aged 2 to 12. Mr. Dowling was the oldest. The family had to move from the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale to blue-collar Eastchester. His mother got a job as a secretary, and Mr. Dowling helped raise his brothers. He says he was marked for life by a deep insecurity that has driven him ever since.

“Nobody else has his makeup,” observes Arthur Nelkin, who started as a broker at C & W the same year Mr. Dowling did, in 1962, but recently left the firm. “He has all the weapons that an upper-class person would have, but with the drive of the first generation. He knows how to get along with corporate guys in a way that somebody up from the gutter couldn’t.”

John Dowling, Superstar in Reality, wields many weapons in office-space transactions.

At age 46, he has an imposing physical presence, standing 6-foot-2 and weighing 210 pounds. He has a big, ruddy face, sandy hair and a nose that has been broken several times while he was skiing, playing football or fighting. He bounds along with a loping stride. He wears pinstripe suits and a gold Rolex watch with black leather strap and carries a battered $700 Italian leather briefcase. His powerful personality includes a locker-room, towel-snapping sense of humor.

“I understand you’re one of the guys on the tapes with Vicki Morgan,” he greets one caller jovially, referring to purported videotapes of VIPs in flagrante delicto.

“I didn’t know they had cameras that could zoom in and pick that up.”

Mr. Dowling also indulges a Hemingwayesque appetite for hunting and fishing for redleg partridge in Spain, quail in South Carolina, salmon in Canada and trout in Alaska. He will tell you about his latest trip, invite you on his next one and warn you that someone is badmouthing you.

C. Burton Bransletter, a lawyer for gulf Oil in Houston, says, “He’s not just some bespectacled real-estate nerd that knows something about buildings. He’s got a lot of Southern in him. He meets well with people. At the same time, he scares them to death.”

While disavowing any business motives, Mr. Dowling has served charities and joined clubs that help him in business. He negotiates leases on a volunteer basis for the Catholic Church. He has served on the admissions and house committees of the University Club. He belongs to the Anglers Club, the Links Club, the Pequot Yacht Club and the New York State Sons of the Revolution.

Says another C & W broker, “In sales, the most important part is to get in to see the right man. You can spend your life negotiating with the wrong man, and another broker can get in to see the right man and make the deal in 24 hours. John has used his time to arrange introductions and meet people through others that he knows or that he’s done business with, by looking up their clubs, by looking up their friends.”

A NEIGHBOR HELPS

Sitting in Mr. Dowling’s corner office, two C & W brokers inform him that a big financial-services company needs a huge block of Manhattan office space, 20 floors or more, that would represent a commission of at least $5 million. The two brokers can’t get through to the chairman of the company, so Mr. Dowling calls a neighbor who recently left it. “Who else pulls the switches there?” he asks his friend. No one, the friend replies, and then volunteers a bit of information about the head man: He, too, likes to hunt. “It could be a common denominator,” the friend says.

Mr. Dowling packs his workday full of phone calls and meetings. He gets about 100 calls a day. His antennae are always out for possible business leads. He watches announcements of corporate expansions. He checks the results of drilling-rights auctions to see which oil firms may need space.

C & W keeps one-third to one-half of the commissions that Mr. Dowling generates. The rest is divided among Mr. Dowling and a team of three other brokers that he leads. The commission is typically 4% of the cumulative rent, but Mr. Dowling sometimes works for less if the deal is big enough or the customer important enough.

‘DO YOU FOLLOW ME?’

Mr. Dowling often uses a ploy that gives him the upper hand in a conversation. He will slay something complicated, if not downright unintelligible, and then ask, “Do you follow what I mean?” When he is explaining something, he will get into a rhythm where he asks, “Do you follow me?” every few sentences. Kevin Ward, who worked for Mr. Dowling for three years and who is the son of a top IBM real-estate executive, explains the technique: “They don’t want to say, ‘No, I’m not as smart as you.’ You get them into agreeing with what your saying. And you take them by the hand and lead them.”

The broker freely concedes that he seeks to establish a “dependency relationship” with clients that will give him control of the situation and the tenant, because that strengthens his negotiating position with the landlord. As for the actual negotiations, he says, “The hardest thing in this business is to think fast on your feet. You’ve got to watch their eyes. You’ve got to know how to move it, budge it, orchestrate it. They’ve got to not be able to see where you’re going.” He usually brings along other C 7 W brokers to meetings to help gauge reactions.

“A lot of people told me, ‘Watch out for him–he’ll take you to the cleaners,'” says Joseph Canizaro, a New Orleans developer. “He makes you feel like he’s doing you a favor by getting you to improve your deal for his client.”

QUICK DATA

Many corporate real-estate executives praise the depth and quality of Mr. Dowling’s services and his ability to assemble and deliver market data overnight. One client just got a 356-page report, bound in blue plastic with the C & W logo, analyzing its options.

Mr. Dowling says his motto is “Never hurt anybody.” He adds, “Never out-and-out lie, but stretch it as far as it will go.”

His very first foray into the real-estate business involved truth-stretching. After flunking out of Tufts University in 1958 (he later returned to graduate), he got a job with a New Hampshire real-estate developer. He advertised “lake lots” in Boston newspapers for $389. But when the prospects arrived, they learned that lots fronting on the lake cost $3,800, and the $389 lots were down the road. It was “bait and switch” advertising, Mr. Dowling says regretfully–“too much selling and no substance.”

Mr. Dowling will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t intend to die broke. The broker has a co-op on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a country house on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound, and his children attend exclusive private schools. He owns part of a cable-TV system for them in trust. His wife, Hebe, adds, “I’ve grown up with the idea that there are certain things (such as one’s income) one doesn’t discuss in polite company. But he feels it’s not a taboo subject. How else are you going to measure how well you’ve done?”

When he is “up,” Mrs. Dowling concludes, “there is something magical about John. You can get swept away by his enthusiasm. You are given a sense that he can handle anything, overcome obstacles that others cannot–a superhuman quality–and that, by golly, if you don’t stick with him you might be lost”

Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Co., Inc., September 1983.