CBRE's man downtown--Gerla defies tough market.

Bradley Gerla always meant to go to law school. It's just that once his real estate career started taking off, he couldn't find the time for studies.

Real estate instantly got him excited, Gerla explains--perhaps because he was involved in the industry from a very young age, having grown up at his father's development firm in Long Island.

"I've always had an interest in the construction and development end of the business," Gerla says.

"In my teens, I worked at my father's construction sites, learning the business from the ground up. It gave me a good understanding of the process."

But though the family business was fairly successful, Gerla's father never encouraged him to join in full-time--he felt that his son's talents would be better applied at a more profitable trade.

"He felt the real opportunities in real estate were in New York City, so he didn't ask me to take over for him and I never really thought twice about going [to his firm]," Gerla explains.

Instead, he went away to college and majored in political science, thinking that one day he would become a lawyer. But in the year after getting his Bachelor's degree Gerla decided to join a real estate firm and earn some money for graduate school--a decision that put his studies off-track permanently.

"I interviewed with a couple of firms and in the fall of 1980, I started with Williamson Picket Gross. While there, I really learned the basics of the business, the canvassing and really enjoyed it," Gerla recalls.

"I [also] started making money right away and said to myself 'Law school can wait.'" Throughout his subsequent travels through various real estate firms--Williams Real Estate, Jones Lang Wooton, Insignia/ESG and now CB Richard Ellis--Gerla developed a specialization in the downtown marketplace and a skill at creative deal making. He is quite happy about having his own niche--one broker can know only so much.

"In the real estate business, it's difficult to be an expert on everything," he says.

"I've had to learn what I am good at and what I am not good at and, if necessary, ask people to help me. You can't be an expert everywhere. The way our firm is set up, if a midtown broker comes up with a lead, they are supposed to use a downtown broker anyway."

When asked about his most challenging assignment, Gerla recalls a fairly recent deal involving the U.S. Attorney General's 70,000 s/f lease at 86 Chambers Street.

According to Gerla, when he undertook the assignment the building had just changed hands, with the new owner planning to convert most of the space to residential use, leaving floors two through seven for offices.

"At the time it looked like a construction zone, not an office location--you really had to be creative to convince an office tenant to come in," he explains.

"And then I heard that the Attorney General was in the market and they had to be near the courts, so I developed a building-within-a-building concept for them. The owner ended up dividing the building into three sections--the condo part, the rental part and the office space--giving each one a separate entrance.

We ended up leasing the entire space to the Attorney General."

Gerla is also quite proud of his work at the Woolworth Building. After the Woolworth Company vacated the property several years ago, the 600,000 s/f chunk of space it occupied had to be marketed to smaller tenants. Using the popularity of downtown as a residential neighborhood as their main selling point, Gerla and colleague Mary Ann Tighe were able to lease all of the space in half a year.

And Gerla is more than ready to undertake the World Trade Center assignments, in case CB Richard Ellis ends up as the leasing agent for the new complex.

He believes that by the time the project is completed, demand for office space will materialize by itself.

"I think the moon and the stars are aligned for leasing activity when those buildings come out," he says.

"Demand for office space will just naturally follow the residential and the retail components."

"It's a prestigious assignment and I would be thrilled to do it."

But when it comes to giving advice to young brokers, Gerla, who often mentors new CBRE employees, insists that great negotiation skills will never make up for a lack of ethics.

"You cannot burn bridges with other brokers," he warns.

"If you get a 'difficult' reputation [in this business], it makes negotiation much more difficult, You have to get the deal done and be sociable at the same time--that's how you make money."