About Us
CTRR provides strategic transaction and advisory services to reduce risk and cost, and increase value in corporate real estate commitments. Operating nationwide, CTRR has handled over $3.1 billion of transactions and more than $7.2 billion of consulting assignments for corporate space users. CTRR never represents landlords. CTRR’s services include:
Specialized Experience
In addition to its expertise in the needs of office space users, CTRR has specialized expertise with technically demanding space including tissue-culture labs, wet chemical labs, R&D facilities, broadcasting facilities, and schools, including K -12 schools and technically oriented vocational schools.
CTRR routinely reduces real estate costs by more than 30% and generates savings of up to 12 times our fee.
For example:
CTRR is 100% free from conflict of interest in the real estate market. We provide candid advice wholly dedicated to helping space users find, create, and structure real estate commitments that best suit their needs – not the space a landlord needs to fill, or a seller wishes to get rid of.
We then negotiate transactions to provide maximum flexibility for business operations and the lowest costs.
CTRR reduces risk because we provide continuity in every phase of the lease, lease renewal, purchase, or disposition your company undertakes. We help executives understand, select, and manage the specialized advisors, including architects, engineers, and contractors, who come and go. This assures that your company’s business objectives remain foremost, and that critical information is transmitted effectively from one phase of a complex project to the next.
CTRR frees your management team to focus on your business. CTRR insulates executives from the distractions of the real estate process and delivers bottom-line results. CTRR is nimble, discrete, and responsive. A high degree of principal involvement and staffing by senior-level consultants ensure that your real estate needs will be treated like our own.
Return to Office
With the pandemic’s lockdowns behind us, many corporate leaders are ready to take a second or third more considered approach to office space.
Research from MIT and others shows that return-to-office mandates often back-fire. These mandates send employees the message that management does not trust them to work with commitment off site. One documented result is that high-performing employees with other options disproportionately choose to leave the mandating employer.
At the same time, a majority of employees wish to spend some time in the office – connecting with colleagues, benefiting from real-time, face-to-face communication.
All of this means that the office landscape performs different functions than in the past.
First, employers must learn how office space can enhance employees’ productivity and the experience of coming together. Hint: the answer is not ping-pong tables and coffee bars.
Second, the physical design must account for the new reality of hybrid, sometimes-in, sometimes-out office users.
When a five-day a week office user claims space that a three-day user reserved online, what happens to the office atmosphere? Is the space dominated by territorial squabbles and insider cliques?
Are some spaces inherently more desirable? Say, near a window?
Or, are some seats less functional? So densely packed that visual and auditory privacy are not possible?
CTRR’s long experience helping clients articulate and quantify space needs can help you develop functional, effective criteria for your new office landscape and the preliminary space program to satisfy those needs.
Leadership/Senior Advisors
Since 1989, Ms. Manley has handled over $1.5 billion of transactions nationwide, and over $3 billion of consulting assignments – exclusively for space users. She has helped her clients reduce real estate costs by over $120 million. Ms. Manley’s clients have included AT&T, IBM, Time Warner, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Nomura Securities, Depository Trust, the State of New York, and other sophisticated space users as well as younger, fast-growing companies who seek to maximize the value they receive for the real estate dollars they spend. Manley and CTRR provide comprehensive expertise to find space, negotiate transactions, and manage the ongoing real estate process to save executive time and reduce project risk.
Ms. Manley has spoken nationwide before the American Corporate Counsel Association, the New York State Bar Association, and other legal and professional organizations.
Ms. Manley has written extensively on how corporate space users can structure and negotiate more cost-effective real estate transactions. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Barrons, Inc. Magazine, and other publications.
She has been quoted on industry trends in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Crain’s New York Business, CFO, Bloomberg, and other media.
Ms. Manley graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Architecture degree, and is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School.
Our Team is Made Up of:
A senior transaction manager leads each project team and is a primary contact with the client team. Senior transaction managers have primary responsible for site searches and conducting site visits with clients. This includes the ability develop nuanced market knowledge based on a client’s particular requirements. Senior transaction managers assist in structuring offers and counter-offers to maximize client value and also participate in lease negotiations. Senior transaction managers lead the seach for suitable architects and general contractors for client projects and are responsible for interviewing and helping clients to select these advisors. During construction of the client project, senior transaction managers participate in construction administration to help assure on-time, on-cost delivery of what the client negotiated for. Senior transaction managers generally come to CTRR with a background in corporate real estate at senior level.
Transaction managers provide many of the same services as a senior transaction manager. On complex projects, transaction managers are generally paired with a senior transaction manager. On less complicated projects, a transaction manager may be a primary contact for the client team. Transaction managers generally come to CTRR with a background in corporate real estate or an undergraduate degree in real estate and project management.
Financial analysts work closely with CTRR leadership, transaction advisors and research associates to understand all likely costs the client will incur in a real estate transaction including, in the case of a lease, rent, operating costs, build-out costs, real estate taxes, and other costs, offset as relevant by incentives, abatements or other concessions. In connection with lease negotiations, including lease renewals, CTRR financial analysts develop detailed life-cycle cost analyses (discounted cash flows) to assist clients in comparing complex non-fungible options. For purchase transactions, financial analysts provide comparable data to assist clients in understanding and evaluating true costs as part of an overall assessment of best fit.
Research associates assist the CTRR team in developing market knowledge, including demographics, wage rates, unemployment data, backgrounds on building owners’ identity and performance, available incentives or abatements including those provided to space users by federal or state and local governments, utility companies or others. Research associates come to CTRR with a variety of backgrounds and always a curiosity to dig deep and discover more about the world.
For relevant projects, CTRR assigns counsel as part of our transaction team to assess particular lease or purchase terms from a business perspective. Consulting counsel come to CTRR with experience as in-house corporate real estate counsel or partners in the real estate department of a law firm. This extra diligence enables CTRR to provide finely-tuned business advice in structuring a transaction for our clients. CTRR does not provide legal services to our clients, and our use of consulting counsel does not replace the client’s need for counsel representing the client in a transaction.