NEW YORK—With three years under his belt as Colliers International's president, eastern region, Joseph Harbert has a lot to be proud of, including diversifying the firm's New York clients, recruiting key professionals and pioneering a successful broker-training program. GlobeSt.com spoke exclusively with Harbert about his role, the New York brokerage scene and the firm's Accelerate training program.

Harbert says that Colliers's growth plans have dovetailed perfectly with the upswing in the New York market, enabling the eastern region to develop its infrastructure and refine the way it does business. Part and parcel of that has been growing its staff. “We've been very busy, growing our talent and our revenue,” says Harbert. “Not only have we retained good people, we have especially built up a vibrant research, marketing and strategic consulting and financial analytics practice. It was important to have a state-of-the-art consulting operation in New York that provides financial analysis, cutting edge research and top of the line marketing to the brokers.”

In order to tackle that task, Harbert recruited Linda Dow, who he worked with at another firm for several years, and she has been working shoulder to shoulder with him building Colliers' consulting practice. Colliers has gone outside the box to recruit talent for its research and consulting practices, including hiring an art director, as well as a professional with architectural experience and a degree from Rhode Island School of Design. Harbert believes that the ability to have current, detailed information—and specific property and market analysis—available for clients whenever they need it is crucial, and he has assembled the necessary components for the consulting practice including graphics, research, strategic planning and market analytics and bundled it into a service that allows every broker to get as much as they need. “It's all wrapped up with a nice bow on it for everybody, and it puts the tools in the hands of the brokers so they can do what they do best.”

Other top recruits in the New York office include Craig Caggiano, a corporate-services expert who brought the Disney account to Colliers; Howard Grufferman, a vice chairman in the New York office whom Harbert has been courting for the past 10 years, and who arranged one of the largest New York City leases in 2015; Joe Cabrera, one of the top office brokers in the market, who joined the team last year and works on major corporate accounts and has been a “real blessing to have, a positive guy with great corporate relationships,” says Harbert; Kim Brennan, COO for the Tri-State area; and David Simon as the market leader in New Jersey.

“We're simultaneously recruiting brokerage talent and very talented real estate professionals,” says Harbert. “The recruiting market is as good as I've ever seen it because of all the movement in the industry, and this will continue. I am focused on building an organization that best serves what our clients need and want, not on being the biggest. You don't need to be bigger to be better. We're also building for the long haul. We're not just focused on the current market cycle, but on enhancing a sustainable model that will allow us to operate at an extremely high level of success and efficiency well into the future, and adaptable to real-world market conditions.”

Harbert adds that the company has a growth plan and is somewhere past the halfway point in recruiting in the Tri-State region. “At any given moment, I'm talking to between 20 and 25 people who are thinking about making a move.” The fact that Craig Robinson, president of Colliers International USA, and Cynthia Foster, who joined the firm earlier this year to head up national office services, are also headquartered in New York makes the demand even higher, adds Harbert, given that there is direct access to the executive leadership of the firm.

Another area that Harbert has grown for the eastern division is the types of tenants it represents on a regular basis. When he arrived, the focus was on Midtown South, the garment sector and small to mid-cap tenant representation. It has since added more corporate-brand-name tenants to its client list. “We are very happy about where we are and extremely optimistic about where we're going,” says Harbert.

The firm has also elevated is location and the design of its offices, moving from 380 Madison to 666 5^th Ave., where it not only has better exposure, but also has adopted a more open floor plan featuring glass office doors as well as a central “Hub” where professionals can meet, eat, or take a break. “It's cliché to say we're collaborating, but we are,” says Harbert. “It's not a totally open plan, but we took a step in the direction of preserving our older culture with offices and combining it with open space. The team has been thrilled with the space, and often proudly walk our clients through the office.”

Another key component of Colliers' growth in New York is the firm's Accelerate Program, which Harbert has embraced. “I've been leading and developing real estate training programs for more than 25 years, and this is the best I've ever been a part of. The program is based on a model coming out of our Canadian operation, and we adapted it here for New York.”

The program, rather than the typical piecemeal style of hiring and training brokers, recruits, trains and accelerates several brokers at once, teaching them first about the company and then about the business. As with any organization, the youth movement is a key to sustained success. “We have a group of accelerated brokers with different levels of experience, but mostly newbies,” says Harbert. “We've given them three months of orientation—nobody in corporate America gets that much orientation, especially in real estate. We're turning the old apprentice system on its head. Our mentors all have at least five to 10 years in the business, and everybody is assigned to a manager, for example Kim Brennan, our COO. They train at least twice a week and have assignments at all times, so they're learning about the industry and helping us with data. There's lots to learn in the real estate business, and you need to focus on the building blocks before you get to representing tenants or landlords.”

But the eastern division is not just focused on Manhattan. Harbert views this market as a hub that feeds out into New Jersey, Connecticut, Queens and Long Island—and the rest of the country. “Part of where we see opportunity here is in sending business outside New York,” says Harbert. “We were not number one for Colliers in the US in terms of sending business out to the field when I got here, but now we're number one in business sent out in all of 2015. We're also number one in getting business back, so in very real terms we can see that helping our other offices elevates the entire organization. Plus it's the right thing to do. New York is the nerve center for Colliers. Everything we do in New York has a connection to things going on throughout the tri-state area—New Jersey in particular is on the rise—but what might begin in New York extends all across the US and globally.”

Overall, Harbert has a positive view for the future of the New York region of Colliers and the overall New York market, with employment growth up, availabilities going down below 10% and the balance shifting toward landlords. Prices are up for both sales and leases, and absorption has been positive for all three areas of the market, he says. “Many people think of the real estate cycle in terms of which inning we're in if the market were a baseball game, but we don't think about it that way; the analogy implies that the end is coming” says Harbert. “Our perspective is this: The economy is strong, New York has survived the last financial meltdown better than any other place in the world, people want to work here, it's a safe haven for capital and there's no sign of falloff any time in the near future. Still, when you look back at the last strong market, it's still relatively low compared to that. The world has moved on, and people sometimes laugh when I say this, but New York is a bargain compared to other major financial cities in the world.”