Calling the property shots: Gregg Popkin and Wayne Taub Insignia/ESG property management group. (Profile of the Week).

Gregg Popkin admits that snagging the plumb assignment of managing the Met Life building would have been unthinkable four years ago.

"We wouldn't have wanted it and couldn't have handled it back then," said Popkin, executive director at Insignia! ESG's property management group.

Today, Popkin and his right-hand man Wayne Taub, managing director of operations for the group, are singing a different tune. In addition to outbidding the industry stalwarts to win the Met Life building assignment, Insignia has landed assignments for such large properties as the 2.4 million-SF building at 111 8th Ave.

"It was a large open bid process (for the Met Life building)," Popkin said. "We feet fortunate to have gotten it."

The company's 28 million-SF portfolio now includes 54 properties in the New York and New Jersey area, including the 1.6 million-SF building at 787 7th Ave. and the 800,000-SF building at 485 Lexington Ave.

A few weeks ago, Insignia was appointed property manager-to oversee and retrofit a 1.1-million SF manufacturing plant located at 50 Dey St. in Jersey City, N.J. The building, formerly occupied by the American Can Company, will undergo a major $40 million renovation enabling it to house servers and store data for corporate users.

Popkin credits Insignia's ability to win the assignment to its past experience with properties like these; such as 111 8th Ave. and 470 Vanderbilt Ave. in Brooklyn.

"We have more experience in this area than other companies in the country," Popkin said. "It takes a unique marketing management campaign to fill up this. space."

It was the company's experience with 111 8th Ave. -- with its sensitive data concerns -- that gave Insignia an edge when building security became one of the industry's most pressing issues after Sept. 11.

With the specter of the World Trade Center attacks and the anthrax scares in the weeks that followed, Met Life building officials decided to move to a "closed building" environment for the first time in its 30-year history.

"We had a jumpstart with the closed building concept because of other projects like 111 Eighth Ave.," Taub said.

With its unique configuration (Grand Central Terminal lies underneath it) and high volume of occupants and visitors, the Met Life building has posed the greatest property management challenge of Popkin's career. The city's third largest office building at 2.8 million SF, the Met Life building at 200 Park Ave. has approximately 12,000 occupants and an average of 1,500 to 2,000 daily visitors and 450 package deliveries (not including deliveries of flowers an food,) Popkin said.

Visitors, which must show photo identification, are processed through a visitor center with velvet ropes reminiscent of those used in banks. Urns of hot coffee await visitors who in the past, faced waiting times of up to 30 minutes, Taub said.

When Insignia took over as property managers, Taub introduced changes to maximize the efficiency of visitor processing including the establishment of a separate center to handle messengers.

In addition to recent changes, Met Life has committed to doing a comprehensive security study of 200 Park Ave.

"It's a whole, change in philosophy," Taub said.

Popkin and Taub joined Insignia four years ago and cheerfully admit that they've been "following each other around" for years. The first met working in 1989 when they worked for Jones Lang Wooten in New York, Popkin as vice president and general manager and Taub as a regional manager. Both men also worked or Jaymont Properties, but Taub worked in New York and Boston while Popkin worked in Miami.

When Popkin and Taub came to Insignia, one of their first priorities was to address, what they felt were outdated hiring policies. "The turnover rate was high and some employees were in positions ill matched with their abilities," they said.

"We went out and locked for the people we wanted," Popkin said. "We looked for career-oriented professional people."

Now, the department has a database of people who worked in the property management field in New York so, when the company has a rare opening, finding a proper replacement is easier, they said.

"Since we straightened d out the environment two years ago, we've had almost no turnover," Popkin said.