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The downtown Detroit skyline
A national tenant-centric brokerage house is making a return to the Detroit market.
Mohr Partners Inc., based in Dallas, has poached Mike Sabatini, most recently a locally based broker with Chicago-based Vestian, to lead a resurrected Detroit office that officially opened earlier this month. Sabatini becomes managing partner and Detroit market leader.
The office is part of an expansion for Mohr Partners, which had a presence locally in the early to mid-2010s but faded away as its three primary brokers in the market left or decided to retire. The company also returned to the Cleveland market last month, also poaching a pair of Vestian brokers to lead efforts there. (It also nabbed Vestian brokers in New York and Phoenix.)
It’s the latest expansion for a national tenant rep firm in the Detroit area, coming on the heels of Chicago-based Cresa purchasing Vogel Advisors, a small brokerage firm in Royal Oak, for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock in a deal that closed in the middle of March.
Bob Shibuya, chairman, CEO and owner of Mohr Partners, said Tuesday that his company is expanding nationally in an effort it is referring to internally as Project Gridiron as it targets all 30 NFL cities nationwide.
“Maybe because I played college football,” Shibuya, who lived in Southfield in the mid-1980s, said when asked about the logic behind that. “They are all the markets we want to be in. We do a lot of work with automotive firms and suppliers.”
Credit: Mohr Partners Inc.
Mike Sabatini.
That makes Detroit, obviously, a logical and critical outpost.
It hasn’t yet been determined where Sabatini, a former Cushman & Wakefield research analyst, will be based, but Shibuya said Royal Oak is in its sights for its new office, which at full strength should have at least six to eight brokers.
“We want to cover all the Detroit metro, so we want to be in a central location. He is the first of what we would hope to be many” broker hires, Shibuya said.
And while the Cleveland office may set the stage for a statewide expansion in Ohio to other major metros like Columbus and Cincinnati, Shibuya doesn’t see other Michigan locations in Mohr Partners’ future as it focuses on what he called “tier one and tier two” cities.
In addition to tenant representation, Mohr Partners also does corporate services like project management, site selection, lease administration and portfolio management. However, tenant representation brings in the majority of the company’s revenue, Shibuya said.
The office is another in Mohr’s arsenal. In addition to its new Cleveland outpost, it has also added or expanded its presence in cities like Seattle, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston and New York. It has 25 offices across the U.S.
When Mohr Partners had entered the Detroit market more than a decade ago, starting in 2012, it poached longtime local brokers that had been associated with the brokerage house now officially known as Newmark: Steve Morris, Mitchell Lipton and Randall Tarnow.
Morris now has his own shop, Farmington Hills-based Axis Advisors LLC, while Tarnow is back with Newmark. Lipton retired about 18 months ago, Shibuya said.
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