"'If you are not helping your
client with all thier needs,
including international, then
your competition is.'"
Mike Broomell, SIOR
Matthew Leguen De
Lacroix, SIOR, FRICS
Scott Mulligan, SIOR
However, the biggest difference is that in the U.S.
leases are long; in Singapore, leases are for two or
three years.”
In 1992, Mike Broomell, SIOR, came to
Indonesia to do work for the Trammel Crow fam-
ily. He is now a managing director for Colliers
International in Jakarta. Twenty years ago, the com-
mercial brokerage business was wide open, which,
to Broomell, meant that there was room to introduce
best practices.
“When I first came to Indonesia in 1992, hardly
anybody in Asia was doing tenant representation,”
he remembers. “There were some firms doing it, but
the business was very small and usually the firms
were paid by the tenant. So, one of the things I
started here was implementing the U.S. concept of
tenant representation, which I thought made sense
in this environment. This was a fairly opaque mar-
ket and I was told tenant representation would never
work, but it caught on fairly well. After the eco-
nomic crash of 1997-1998 in Indonesia, most new
real estate development stopped but there was still a
continued need for a tenant rep business.”
Even with that success, Broomell cautions against
national chauvinism. “People in the rest of the world
do things differently and look at things differently
than in the United States,” Broomell says. “The one
mistake I see with people coming here is thinking
that the American way is the right way. This is a dif-
ferent culture and different history and you have to
adjust to a new way of looking at things.”
Recently, Scott Mulligan, SIOR, a partner and
broker with Ellington Tenant and Facilities Services
in Toronto, worked with a global technology com-
pany that needed offices in India.
“This was a company we had been trying to get
into Toronto,” says Mulligan, “and once we were in
agreement there, the company said it needed these
other offices. That was something we handled, but
we had to spend a lot of time figuring out who the
best brokers in India would be and then educating
our client how the market works there as there are
some very interesting nuances in that market that
makes it different from other places in Asia.”
If a broker hasn’t done a deal overseas before,
Mulligan says, it can be complicated.
“When people get started in international busi-
ness they get very gung-ho without taking the time to
find out how the deal will unfold due to the idiosyn-
crasies of the foreign venues,” Mulligan explains.
“The first thing they need to do is find out how deals
work, how deposits get done, what security can be
had, terms, fees, etc, before you even start the pro-
cess with the client.”
Mulligan adds that having an SIOR as a tenant
rep in a foreign city is a wonderful asset, although
this kind of service is much more prevalent in North
America than elsewhere around the world.
From an overseas viewpoint, the message is really
not much different. If you are in North America and
have a client coming to Asia, you need to find a
trustworthy associate with knowledge of the local
market.
1) Ask clients what needs they may have
overseas;
2) Discover how you aregoing to get resources
for clients overseas because you are not going
to do the work yourself;
3) Make sure the clients are educated about the
market and that what is being proposed
makes sense.
Gabriel Silverstein, SIOR, president of Angelic
Real Estate in New York, has done deals in 17 for-
eign countries. He too, has a few rules for interna-
tional business:
• Make absolutely certain from the start you have
a local partner. Being part of the SIOR network
helps tremendously as does being part of a corporate
network. “Whether it’s someone from your own net-
work or an SIOR, they better be on board from day
one,” Silverstein attests.
