WASHINGTON, DC-As ubiquitous as its presence is in the local DC commercial real estate community, it is easy to forget that Cassidy Turley launched in 2008 as a union of four former Colliers affiliates that were joined by four other regional firms in March 2010 to rebrand as Cassidy Turley. It has made significant momentum since then of course, as anyone remotely active in the market will tell you. Still, though, its goal is not necessarily to be the biggest player in DC, or nationwide for that matter.

Peter Hennessy joined Cassidy Turley from JLL in 2011 as president of its New York City tri-state region, says as much: "We're never going to become as big as some of our competitors, people that we go toe-to-toe with every day. Yet our intention is not to become the biggest but to continue to be the best, and to have our client base view us as a real strategic partner in the work that they're doing."

The emphasis has paid off, thanks to a combination of existing relationships and vigorous business-development initiatives.

Hennessy, who was brought in to provide "an injection of energy" for an already well-performing operation that began life as Colliers ABR, offers insight into the foundation underpinning Cassidy Turley. "Most of these firms coming together were single-market firms, a few multi-market, but these were not nationally focused organizations as the original Cassidy Turley organization came together," he says. Along with Colliers ABR, the other founding organizations were Colliers Turley Martin Tucker, Cassidy & Pinkard Colliers and Colliers Pinkard, which were joined in 2010 by BT Commercial in Northern California, BRE. "We don't believe we need a presence in every single market in America. We need to have a plan to provide best-in-class services in every market where our clients would like to have a presence."

"Clearly, we've been leaders in many of our markets historically, and we have come from origins where our local market was the predominant interest that we had," says Michael Kamm, who headed Cassidy Turley's Northern California operations—and, before that, predecessor firm BT Commercial—before becoming the company's president this past October. "As we put the company together over the past five or six years, we felt it was important to retain that local perspective and recognize that local markets each have their own dynamics, but at the same time overlay a national infrastructure and national service delivery capability" sought by corporate and institutional clients.

Accordingly, Kamm says, Cassidy Turley's 3,700 professionals see themselves as both local and national players. "They recognize the value and benefit to the client of that dual aspect, because fundamentally, real estate services are delivered locally, yet it's very important to have a national approach to many of the business lines,” he says. "Any individual transaction has a mostly local component, but there are elements that need to have a national or regional perspective and service delivery capability built in."

He says that many of Cassidy Turley's clients have said they believe the firm does "a better job of integrating national and local services and transactions into a bundle than they have experienced with other firms.

"Our people get the notion that our relationships with clients are multifaceted. They understand that we're working as a team to provide the service to the client, and that service is multifaceted. It's not simply a deal or a property-management or project management assignment; it's a relationship with a client that can take us in any one of those directions to solve problems for the client."

For Cassidy Turley's 455-million-square-foot property management platform, says the firm's Marla Maloney, "One of the opportunities that we have in front of us is to expand our relationships with existing clients. We've built the platform to be organized around our clients, and we're still fairly nimble in terms of being able to customize or tailor what we're delivering. But we have large relationships across service lines, and we have to leverage those. So as we've entered new markets, typically we've integrated predominantly brokerage firms with established relationships. So the opportunity for me is to build a high-quality property management team and staff to deliver across service lines and integrate property management into these established relationships."

Portfolio sales provide many of the opportunities for Cassidy Turley to add business in the property management arena, says Maloney, executive managing director and principal. When you're a prospective client selecting a national services provider, "you're buying consistency from market to market. You're buying leadership or oversight in the deliverables. We have a dedicated transition team of people that do nothing but take on these portfolios, because first impressions really matter."

If a property manager is sitting at a desk entering data about a portfolio's tenants or vendors the day a sale closes "that's not a good thing," she says. It means the manager is not out shaking hands with tenants and finding out what they like about the property and what could be improved. "A dedicated transition team is really important to hit the ground running," Maloney says.

Stay tuned for part 3: Capital Markets.

Read part one of this feature, parts of which ran in Real Estate Forum, here.