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An office deal for nearly 900,000 square feet — like the lease extension inked by AT&T in Bedminster this past summer — would be a feather in the cap of any commercial real estate broker.

It certainly is for Robert Donnelly Sr., but it’s also the latest in a long line of high-profile deals going back to 1993. That’s when he started representing the telecom giant in New Jersey, an assignment that has touched everything from the sale of a headquarters complex to the needs of its spinoff companies.

“We’ve done everything for AT&T,” said Donnelly, an executive vice chairman with Cushman & Wakefield, whose client roster and staying power are equally impressive. The venerated broker has been with C&W in New Jersey for 35 years, advising the likes of General Electric and BASF of North America in addition to AT&T and other major corporations.

It’s why Donnelly is a titan in New Jersey’s commercial real estate sector and the head of one of the highest-volume leasing teams in the country. NJBIZ spoke with the industry veteran to discuss the ever-changing office market and his tenure with C&W.

NJBIZ: Your specialty is in office space for major corporate tenants, so let’s start there. How is the market these days?

Robert Donnelly: The market is good. What we’re finding with tenants is it’s a flight to quality — it’s a flight to either new buildings under build-to-suits or totally retrofitted buildings, down to the steel and back up again. The inventory in our marketplace is aging; a lot of it was built in the ’80s and early ’90s, and with technology today and where companies want to be with their environmental impact, it’s driving new a lot of new construction. We’ve seen a lot of it in just the last couple of years.

The amount of new buildings being built for major corporations in the last five years compared to the previous 10 or 15 is outstanding. Just this year, you have Prudential moving into their new (building) in Newark. You’ve got MetLife just finishing a major regional headquarters in Whippany; they’ll be moving in ’16. Zoetis, (a spinoff of Pfizer) is doing a total retrofit of a building in Parsippany.

It’s kind of a sign of the times. The flight is definitely to quality and it’s definitely with a focus on the workforce.

NJBIZ: If all of that has changed, what has stayed the same over the years?

RD: I don’t know that a whole lot has stayed the same other than we need space. In terms of the architecture, the way the space is used, the amenities, where they want the space, it’s an ever-changing environment.

NJBIZ: Fair enough. Let’s get back to your relationship with AT&T. It’s been 22 years — what are the different types of transactions and needs you have to handle for a client over that length of time?

RD: AT&T for many, many years — probably 20 years — was the largest employer in the state. We started working for them when their portfolio in New Jersey was 20 million square feet. So we did everything from the sale of their headquarters in Basking Ridge to — across the board — their whole portfolio. The majority of it was office space, but there was some tech space.

We dealt with the spinoff of Lucent Technologies in ’96. We represented Lucent for 15 years after that. So we’ve been with them both in New Jersey and we’ve expanded our footprint — we now represent them across the United States for a long time.

NJBIZ: What about the most recent deal in Bedminster, which you said was a lease restructuring and extension for AT&T? How long does it take for a deal like that to come together?

RD: They’re existing tenants, so we looked at a number of options — relocating, restacking, both relocating within the market and out of the market — so I would say it was probably an 18-month to two-year process before all of the options were vetted out and a final decision was made.

NJBIZ: Getting back to the bigger picture, what about real estate brokerage as an industry? We’ve seen several mergers and acquisitions among brokerage houses in recent years, so what has changed and what is driving this consolidation?

RD: It has become much more sophisticated; the skillsets that are necessary are much more extensive — just the sophistication of the information that’s available, the amount of data that’s available, what our clients are asking us to do for them, versus what they used to ask us to do for them. You’ve had corporate real estate go to basically to an outsourced model over the last 15 or 20 years, particularly in the last 10 years, where rather than have the large real estate group in-house, they’ve outsourced a lot of those services to third-party providers like us, like Johnson Controls, our competitors. It’s not only transaction management — it’s facilities management, project management, financial analysis, much of which used to be done in-house but is now done externally.

And the fact that the major brokerage houses like ourselves have these capabilities internally — and we’ve built them over the years — that makes them available to the smaller tenant as well who never had access to that kind of expertise. Unless they wanted to go out and bring in an accounting firm or engineering firm. Now it’s really one-stop shopping, and you (need) a full platform of services, as well as a global platform of locations, because clients want to be able to deal with one person for all of their needs, whether it’s New Jersey, the U.S., North America, Asia. And that’s driving a lot of consolidation within the industry.

We just went through a merger ourselves here in September with two other good-sized firms. All that is driven toward building a global platform that speaks to the needs of our clients.

NJBIZ: Speaking of the industry, you work directly with your son Robert Jr. at C&W, who is a member of the team with you and Marc Rosenberg. What’s it like to have him be in the business, and what have you tried to pass on?

RD: Obviously, I think any father would have some sensitivities going in, but it has just been wonderful. Rob interned for us when he was in college, so he had a sense for what the business was about, and I had a real feeling that I thought he’d do well. In spite of that, post-graduation, he decided he wanted to go out on his own, and he did. And he had a very nice career working in the financial services industry. He started traveling a lot, and the whole time I was basically pushing him to think about joining us — and after 10-plus years of working in the financial services business and Wall Street, he got married, his wife was pregnant and he was traveling a lot when he didn’t want to travel. I said, ‘Just give it a shot. If you don’t like it, you can always go back.’

The first few years I had him in East Rutherford working with our capital markets guys. And then after we kind of felt out how this thing was going to work, he’s been out here in Morristown for the last eight years. He’s been a partner with Marc Rosenberg and me for the last five, and it’s really a nice thing to be able to spend the amount of time I spend with him and also watch him mature into a good broker. So I couldn’t be happier.

NJBIZ: You and your team are based in Cushman’s Morristown office at Headquarters Plaza, which has a story of its own when it comes to your career.

RD: One of the things we pride ourselves on, both at Cushman and us personally in our team, is our relationships. My first deal when I came to work at Cushman & Wakefield, which was 35 years ago, was to become the agent for the Fisher family at Headquarters Plaza. It had not yet been built, it was a to-be-built project.

I was only here six months when I got the assignment. By the time the project was built, we were 100 percent leased, and 35 years later, we’re still the agent.

I think it’s the longest-running exclusive agency, maybe in the country. I ran it for 15 years, Marc for 10, and Rob (Jr.) has been running it for five or six. And we’re 97 percent occupied, so it’s a good success story.

NJBIZ: Thirty-five years? That even dwarfs your relationship with AT&T, which is ironic given the fact that your work at Headquarters Plaza led to that assignment.

RD: At the time, I didn’t represent AT&T, but there was 360,000 square feet. We leased 60,000 square feet to Riker Danzig and 300,000 square feet to what then was the headquarters for American Bell, which is the AT&T computer company.

And in fact, that relationship introduced me to AT&T, and over the years, through that relationship I got to know them. And they turned around and said, ‘We’d like to hire you to work for us.’ And I’ve been doing that for 23 years.

NJBIZ: Anyone who sees your resume and the tenure you’ve had would be inclined to ask — have you thought about retiring at any point?

RD: Fifteen years ago, I was counting the days. When I finally hit financial security, I realized I like what I do more than anything else that I do. So it’s still a lot of fun, and when it stops being fun, I’ll walk away.

Luckily, I like to think that myself and our team are at the top of our game. In the meantime, I have great friends here. I love the challenge, I love the competition.

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