Cushman & Wakefield, the giant Chicago-based real estate services company, has made two key hires for its data center business. Data center brokers Bo Bond and Ali Greenwood have left competitor Jones Lang LaSalle to join Cushman's Global Data Center Advisory as executive managing director and executive director, respectively, and will work out of the company's Dallas office. The two plan to work together as a team, as they did at JLL.
In a conversation with Data Center Knowledge, Greenwood described the pair's relationship as "Mutt and Jeff," a reference to a long-time staple of newspaper comics. Bond told us they come to the table with over six years of experience working together.
Although based in Dallas, the third-largest data center market in the US, Bond and Greenwood said only about 20 percent of their work will be focused on the local market.
"The other 80 percent is truly global," Bond said, adding that much of their work has been helping clients establish cloud on-ramps from their data centers. "With the amount of M&As that are happening, we're right-sizing inventories, bleeding off old contracts, expanding, and giving flexibility to other service lines. So our practice is truly global."
Bond has more than 25 years of experience in the commercial real estate industry, having joined The Staubach Company in 1998, where he remained through its 2008 merger with JLL. He is considered to be one of Dallas’s top brokers, having negotiated more than 30 million square feet of commercial real estate transactions in markets around the world.
Greenwood, who spent nearly seven years at JLL and leaves as senior VP of data center solutions, previously spent over two years with Digital Reality, the world's second-largest data center provider by revenue.
"I'd say probably a little over the majority of our business is end users looking for colocation space," Greenwood said. "That's evolved as technologies have evolved, with some people needing hybrid colocation -- so some cloud consulting type of services as well as traditional colocation is involved."
"A portion of our business is certainly helping the data center operators as they're looking to enter new markets or expand in existing markets," she added, "whether that's finding land for them with good access to space, power, and fiber to build a data center, or doing a sale-leaseback, or finding an opportunity for them to get faster speed to market by retrofitting a building."
In a statement, Dave Fanning, who leads Cushman's Data Center Advisory Group, said, "The addition of Bo and Ali, with their dedicated focus to this market, further enables Cushman & Wakefield to keep pace with the market dynamics and better service our clients' data center requirements."
