Thomas Collins
Principal and Managing Director, Avison Young
Age: 68
Industry experience: 42 years
Thomas Collins is the new head of the New England region for Avison Young, a Toronto-based commercial real estate brokerage that opened its first Hartford office in 2015. Collins oversees the firm’s New England region comprising a team of 35 employees in Boston and two in Hartford. A veteran commercial real estate executive, Collins spent a large portion of his career with Cushman & Wakefield in Boston, and most recently was running a consulting and professional coaching firm before joining Avison Young on Aug. 1. Collins took advantage of the traditional industry lull in August to assess the firm’s local brokerage strengths in brokerage, project management and property management as he looks for opportunities to strengthen its local business lines.
Q: Hartford’s office market has struggled to regain momentum since the recession, with a vacancy rate of nearly 18 percent in the second quarter according to one industry report. Where are the opportunities there?
A: In my Cushman & Wakefield days, we had a Hartford office and we did pretty well. I’ve got two guys covering Greater Hartford and they have responsibility for most of the state, except Fairfield County is covered out of our New York offices. Greater Hartford and New Haven are going to be the focus for growth in that marketplace. Hartford’s economy has been slow to grow, but there’s a lot of medical office, tech and insurance-related technology. And the industrial market down there is very good for distribution, on a build-to-suit and spec construction basis. There are opportunities there. We’ve got to add quality people to our team, and I’d love to have a stronger presence.
Q: What are your top goals for growth of the two New England offices?
A: In Boston, my first priority is suburban brokerage. We have a handful of suburban brokers, but we need coverage in all of the markets: north, central, south and Cambridge. We need some help. You can always use more good capital markets people. We need to grow across the board in every service line, and that’s the objective and that’s why I am here.
Q: How are Avison Young’s compensation system and territories structured?
A: We’re a commission shop. Brokers earn commissions based upon the transactions they do. I know a lot of firms are moving to a salary-bonus situation, and that’s good for some people and maybe not good for others. I like to cover the market by geography, so we have a downtown team and we’ve got teams in each of the suburban submarkets. That’s where we have the greatest opportunity for growth. We just don’t have enough brokers to cover all of those markets. If a piece of business came into this office for a client who wanted to be north of the city, that would go to the broker who knows that market and can do the best job.
Q: What was the focus of your recent consulting work with Collins Strategies?
A: I set it up as a consulting firm, but also a coaching and mentoring firm. The tagline was “corporate and individual achievement.” On the coaching side, when I started the firm I thought it would be primarily real estate brokers getting coaching. A lot of my clients were professionals, but not all brokers. I also had people in different kinds of businesses: energy, media, entrepreneurs, academia. And then I did some corporate work, primarily for real estate companies, independent firms, development firms, private money lenders and startups. That was primarily going in and taking a look at what the company was doing, its objectives, what its leadership was doing and how it could grow.
Q: Are you seeing more opportunities for people outside the commercial real estate industry to make mid-career transitions, particularly in specialized areas such as life science project management and workplace strategy?
A: If you think about the business being bifurcated between the occupier and the owner side, when you get somebody who was responsible in corporate America for how companies use their space, it makes sense for us to bring them on board to advise companies on how to use their space. We have a chief innovation officer. I don’t think he has a real estate background, but he recently hired a data scientist. That doesn’t sound like a typical real estate job.
Collins’ Five Favorite Vacations:
- Seven-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon
- Exploring and snorkeling in the Galapagos Islands
- Aruba
- Oceania cruise – 14 days on the Mediterranean and Aegean
- Floating on a glacial melt in Alaska through the Valley of the Eagles
