Newmark Searches for New CEO

Newmark’s headquarters at 125 Park Avenue — normally a buzz of high-power dealmaking — has been strangely quiet this summer.

The company is renovating several of its floors. Many top brokers have been working offsite for the past few weeks, waiting to return and see who’s gotten the most desirable new digs.

It’s not clear if the new setup will retain the layout preferred by longtime CEO Barry Gosin, who famously worked not from an office but instead from an open bullpen, a lá Michael Bloomberg when he was in City Hall.

Office architecture, however, is far from the most significant shakeup at the company. Newmark recently announced that Gosin, who has helmed the company for nearly five decades, will be stepping down as CEO at the end of the year. (He’ll remain on as chairman of the company through 2029.)

That means the search is on for a successor. It’s not exactly clear whether Newmark’s board will be looking for a long-time leader or someone for a short-term role. The company disclosed that it had hired an executive search firm more than a year ago to assist in long-term succession planning, with the understanding that Gosin’s contract expires at the end of this year.

The company is still wading through candidates as Gosin notably stepped down without a replacement, suggesting that there were no slam-dunk options for an immediate transition.

The name that comes up as the most likely candidate is Lou Alvarado, the company’s chief operating officer.

“Similar to Bary, he’s a broker’s broker,” said Piper Sandler analyst Alex Goldfarb, who covers Newmark. “He’s very team-oriented. And he’s a tough guy; you know you’re not pulling one over on him.”

Despite his natural hand dealing with brokers, Alvarado wasn’t actually one himself. Alvarado started on the landlord side, spending a decade at Travelers Insurance Company before co-founding Insight Partners.

He spent about eight years at Cushman & Wakefield, where he was president of the company’s Eastern region before joining Newmark in 2015 as an executive vice president in the Boston office. From there, he worked his way up into the C-suite.

Newmark — maybe even more so than competitors like CBRE or JLL — has a very insular culture that can create competition and conflict among some of its top dealmakers. Dealing with those kinds of issues is one of Alvarado’s strengths.

“What he does really well is one of the things Barry doesn’t like to do, and that’s dealing with broker issues,” said Robert Griffin, co-head of the capital markets group based out of Boston. “There are fights all the time and he’s very fair and honest and assesses the truth very quickly.”

Another name mentioned as a possible candidate is Jack Fuchs, who was promoted earlier this year to president of global asset services.

Fuchs was the CEO of Spring 11, a financial services advisory that Newmark acquired a stake in in 2017. Fuchs ran Spring 11 as a separate subsidiary under Newmark with some 700 employees, and several people pointed to his leadership skills as a strong qualification for the CEO role.

Newmark bought the remaining interest in Spring11 in 2021, and in April this year promoted Fuchs to the global assets role.

“Jack is a builder by nature: someone who leads with clarity, operational discipline and an instinct for solving complex challenges,” Alvarado said in a statement at the time.

The elephant in the room is Kyle Lutnick, the 30-year old son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The Lutnick family’s Cantor Fitzgerald owns 16.4 percent of the shares in Newmark and more than 50 percent of the company’s voting stock — which means the family’s influence looms over any major decision at the company.

Kyle was named the chief strategy officer of Newmark in May — a newly created role at the company. It’s unlikely that someone so young and inexperienced would be appointed CEO at this point and time, insiders said, but they wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Kyle ascending to the job sometime in the future.