Cornish Takes Top Broker from Rival
Submitted March 4, 2010, 1:15 PM
Michael Maffia will lead Cornish’s new Net Leased/Retail Investment Group. He brings with him several agents and support staff members. He will continue to office out of San Francisco.
As recently as Feb. 2, BT issued a news release touting the 31-year-old Maffia’s sales prowess. As a managing director for BT’s Leased Investment Group and a BT partner, Maffia was the firm’s most-productive broker in terms of revenue for 2007, 2008 and 2009.
Maffia holds a master’s of science degree in applied finance and economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He specializes in the sale of leased single-tenant and multi-tenant retail properties nationwide. Such products have emerged as a favored asset class as some investors migrate to more conservative holdings after taking a beating in property values over the last several years. With debt markets thawing and a relative paucity of such product for sale, the pricing of those properties has stabilized and is beginning to rise.
Also joining Cornish is Putnam Dailey, who joined the Maffia team in 2005, according to the brokerage. Daily specializes in investment sales and transaction management and is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Also coming is Justin Stark, a sales associate who joined the Maffia Team in January 2009. Stark previously spent three years with Coldwell Banker Commercial.
Even in 2009, perhaps the worst year for commercial brokers in the last decade with revenue at some firms falling as much as 75 percent, Maffia and his team completed 33 transactions valued at more than $148 million for real estate measuring more than 1.2 million square feet. Over the last three years, he and his team have closed 104 transactions valued at more than $537 million.
His decision was not related to BT Commercial San Francisco’s recent decision to leave its affiliation with NAI to join a collection of other brokerages in the United States and London to form a new company, Cassidy Turley.
A strong allure of moving to Cornish was the firm’s long history—75 years in business, Maffia said—and the opportunity to establish a joint-venture business relationship.
“It is more than a title; it is meaningful ownership,” said Erik Doyle, Cornish’s president.
Maffia’s client base is national with a concentration of investors coming from the West Coast and interested in investing in stabilized properties nationwide. His clients’ geographic concentration jibes well with Cornish’s profile as a dominant regional brokerage.
Maffia’s focus also is expected to complement Cornish’s emerging emphasis on the sale of distressed assets for banks and others. That effort is being spearheaded by Doyle.
Doyle himself has built a name as a significant player in investment sales though he historically has catered to institutional buyers and sellers with tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in buying power and owned assets. Before moving to Cornish himself in 2008, Doyle led the institutional sales team for CB Richard Ellis’ Silicon Valley office. He oversaw the $1.1 billion sale of the 5.3 million square-foot Peery-Arrillaga Silicon Valley portfolio to a fund managed by San Francisco-based Rreef Funds LLC. In recent reports to investors in the fund, Rreef America REIT III, Rreef has singled out the portfolio as poised to perform well in coming years based on its West Coast location in a technology-dominated market.
With Maffia, Cornish now can claim expertise across the spectrum of real property investors and asset sizes. During the commercial property boom from 2005 through early 2007, asset prices rose so much that many individual investors were priced out of the market, Doyle said. With the fall back in prices, those players are expected to return to market.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, Cornish operates 11 offices in the Bay Area and Sacramento and has more than 250 agents. It is one of the largest privately held commercial real-estate service providers in the world, the company says.
