Two More from Trammell Crow Go Out on Own

PORTLAND-Trammell Crow Co.’s urban retail team, Craig Sweitzer and Dan Bozich are leaving the company to establish Urban Works Real Estate. As a result, TCC will be closing its offices in Portland’s tony Pearl District after only 10 months and bringing its urban property management team back to Beaverton by the end of the year.

Physically, Sweitzer and Bozich will be staying put; as they will take over TCC’s fully-furnished digs in the Go By Streetcar building at 1015 NW 11th Ave. Sweitzer owns the 1,200-sf office space in the “condo-ized” building and since February has been leasing it to TCC.

Sweitzer and Bozich tell GlobeSt.com that every account that they had at TCC–which is every account they brought with them to the company in the late 1990s–is coming with them to Urban Works. They include Starbucks, Subway, Paper Zone, Banner Bank and landlord listings like Hoyt Street Properties, one of the Pearl District’s largest mixed-use developers. “Trammel Crow isn’t traditionally a national retail company and so there really were no conflicts with us leaving,” Sweitzer tells GlobeSt.com.

In July, TCC’s Portland Managing Director Chris Nelson left the company to start his own development company and was followed a month later by Jeff Sackett, TCC’s VP of development. The duo set up shop just down the hall from their not-so-old offices in the Go By Streetcar building.

All the departures have come since the person who convinced them to join the company, John Stirek, left the Portland office to become COO of TCC’s Global Services Group at its Dallas headquarters. Stirek, an Oregonian, was promoted from his position as national director of TCC’s development and investment services division, a job he was performing out of the Portland office, where he had been since becoming the company’s top man here in 1991.

When Nelson left in July, Stirek, because of his familiarity with the office, was handed the added responsibility of overseeing the Portland office and the search for Nelson’s successor. Stirek has been back and forth from Dallas several times since then, but no new city leader has been named.

Stirek was not immediately available for comment, but he may be having a case of Déjà vu. When TCC relocated Stirek from Seattle to Portland in 1991, it was to right a ship that had lost several key players. In the spring of that year, the company’s top local dealmaker and partner retired. Adding insult to injury, his replacement defected three weeks after being hired and lured half the staff to join him at a rival firm.