Liberty-Greenfield Quietly Fades to Black

PALO ALTO, CA-Liberty-Greenfield is fading away. A year after shutting down its Denver operation the boutique corporate tenant rep firm founded by John “Jack” Box is shutting down its only other office, in San Bruno, CA.

The decision, confirmed last week by multiple sources, is a bit of a delayed reaction. At the start of the year the remaining brokers in the Palo Alto office–principals Raul Campos, Kenneth Gilbert and Dennis Raney, and Shawn Silk–got up and walked over to CB Richard Ellis, for whom Campos is now managing director of its local office. Two years earlier, the principal who launched the office, John Hamilton, left for Cornish & Carey, where he earned Facebook as a client and is now reportedly assisting Union Bank with a datacenter deal. Neither Hamilton nor Campos, Gilbert or Silk could be reached Friday for comment.

“There is nobody left,” one inside source tells GlobeSt.com. “The group had gotten a little smaller in the past couple of years and the key remaining trio opted to drive someone else’s tenant practice rather than rebuild Liberty Greenfield.”

Bruce Johnson, a former founding principal of Liberty-Greenfield in Denver, tells GlobeSt.com the decision to shut down the California office was unrelated to last year’s decision to shut down the Denver office after Johnson and the rest of the Denver team left to work for the local office of CresaPartners, a competing tenant rep firm. “The Denver office really decided we needed to be part of a national platform,” he says.

The insider tells GlobeSt.com that Hamilton made a similar decision two years ago, and that it was no different for Campos, Gilbert and Silk. “I think they fundamentally thought they had good things going but felt they were missing some opportunities by not getting together with a bigger platform,” says the source. “It wasn’t the loss of the Denver office; we were never set up that way. The two offices never really worked closely together.”

Both offices were owned by Box and company principals. Box could not be reached this week for comment and one of his key people, Rich Wham, did not respond to interview requests.