EXCLUSIVE: Vik Bangia Departs CBRE for New Post at United Properties

Bangia spent five years with CBRE's global corporate services division, where he served as on-site account manager for one of the company's major clients, overseeing its real estate acquisition and disposition activities across the country. During that time Bangia has also been a ViewPoints columnist for GlobeSt.com, a role that he will continue after his move to United Properties.

Both Bangia and Kevin Farrell, executive managing director of corporate real estate services at United Properties, tell GlobeSt.com that they see a significant opportunity to build United's business by focusing on mid-sized corporations. “Kevin's vision for the company, to grow the corporate services business at United Properties, is very compelling and very much fits in line with the mid-cap business that I think is where the sweet spot is in the industry today,” Bangia tells GlobeSt.com.

Farrell says that United sees “a huge market” for corporate services among mid-sized corporations. “The very largest real estate services companies are chasing the huge global corporations, which is great for them because they have built platforms to go after them, but what they're leaving is a large group of mid-cap clients and even a few larger corporations that represent a perfect niche for companies like us,” Farrell says.

Farrell says he recruited Bangia “ to help us take the transaction management and strategic planning part of our business to a new level” as United concentrates on the mid-cap business. His decision to create the new position and Bangia's decision to accept it resulted after the two began to compare notes on their views of the corporate services industry during a chance meeting last October at a CoreNet conference in Las Vegas, where Bangia was teaching a class on the subject.

Bangia says he wasn't looking to leave CBRE, but he saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when their conversations during and after the CoreNet conference led Farrell to create a job description that was “exactly what I would do if I were going from CBRE to a smaller company like United Properties.”Farrell says that United's annual revenue grew by 30% from 2004 to 2005, an indication of the growth in demand from mid-sized companies for corporate services.

“Our business model is specifically targeted to mid-cap comapnaies, and our staffing over the past two years has reflected that model,” he says. He says Bangia is an ideal choice to build the mid-cap business because he is “one of the brightest people that I know in the industry.”

Bangia, who is a regular speaker at corporate real estate industry events, served as director of operations for Stuxicon.com, an Internet start-up company, before joining CBRE. His career also includes 10 years with Unocal Corp., where he handled corporate real estate for a 2.6 million-sf office portfolio. As of this week, according to a CBRE spokesman, no one had been named to fill Bangia's post.