Corcoran out to prove that his price is right.

As compared to the image of the highflying broker who arranges headline-grabbing deals, valuation doesn't exactly seem to be a service line within the real estate industry that exudes a similar kind of rock star appeal.

Always modest, Brian Corcoran, an executive vice president and the head of global valuation services at Cushman & Wakefield, may agree with that assessment, but to look at his resume reveals a different story.

In addition to managing the firm's global valuation business, Corcoran has played an integral role in some of the city's biggest real estate and economic development deals while serving a virtual Who's Who list of prominent financial and real estate firms such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, SL Green, Shorenstein Properties and Vornado.

For Vornado, he analyzed the value of the Bloomberg Building's retail and commercial components to assist in securing long-term financing for those portions after the building's construction was completed in 2004.

Valuation plays an important role in financing transactions because lenders typically need to know that the collateral in the transaction is of sufficient value to secure the loan.

Corcoran has provided similar such valuation services for Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center, the Time Warner Center, Madison Square Garden, the new Yankees Stadium and the Hudson Yards, not to mention countless parcels of land in Manhattan, whose appraised value is used to settle the frequent disputes that arise between landowners and landlords over ground lease escalations.

Because C&W's clients have long enlisted the firm's services for such a diverse array of assignments, Corcoran helped spearhead the segmentation of the appraisal practice into groups whose individual focus was on specific property types such as office buildings, shopping centers, or hotels--specialization that quickly became standard among most large real estate services firms with appraisal businesses.

"If you take a mall like Roosevelt Field on Long Island, it's a business operating as a mall, there's more to the value than just the real estate, there's the interplay between the department store anchor tenants like Macy's all those little shops that feed off those anchors," Corcoran said, explaining how subtle components of value specific to certain property types, which can be overlooked by a generalist, go on to factor prominently into a proper appraisal.

"Having a big anchor is what draws customers to the mall and in turn it draws retailers to the mall, so having a Macy's makes the property more valuable. It's a specialized skill set to appraise the value of something like that."

According to Corcoran, while the practice in New York City is a market leader, C&W has had similar success across the country and has captured a number of deals nationally whose level of complexity highlights the firm's depth of talent and sophistication. The firm is handling the valuation of a massive collection of properties a gas pipeline traverses on its way from Oregon to Texas in order to help calculate the many different ground rents it will have to pay.

"There are a bunch of different owners and the pipeline runs through so many different property types, through urban areas and rural areas and residential, industrial and commercial, it's incredibly complicated but it's the kind of job we're equipped to handle," Corcoran said.

In another unusually complex assignment, C&W is handling the valuation of a number of large parcels of land in upstate New York that an Indian tribe claims to have once owned and alleges were improperly seized by the government.

The tribe is suing for compensation and C&W's appraisal group has been tapped by the tribe's lawyers to examine the value of the land around the time it was seized, about 200 years ago.

"We've brought in our litigation specialists who have done forensic research to analyze what the conditions were in rural upstate New York in the 1700s on thousands of acres of land and to track the values of those parcels over a 200 year period," Corcoran said.

"This is where specialization comes in. We're researching old deeds and maps as to what the land was like in 1756, what farmer Joe sold the land for to farmer Smith, to establish a baseline for the value. It's an incredible assignment."