Rick Marchisio and Brian Lynch had been friends and industry colleagues for nearly 20 years,
and they had often mused about the day they’d join forces to launch their own firm.

Lee & Associates — a commercial real estate brokerage with roots on the West Coast —
provided that opportunity in late 2008. The firm was in search of a new office in New Jersey,
offering a chance to combine Lynch’s background in property management with Marchisio’s
experience as a longtime branch manager with Grubb & Ellis.

“We both worked the same market,” Lynch said. “We did a lot of transactions together. And the
opportunity for me to partner with somebody who really ran a full-service brokerage operation
was very attractive.”

That partnership came to be in 2009, marking the start of Lee & Associates’ current office in New
Jersey. A decade later, the office has grown from just four brokers and three employees to a
team of 55, including 34 licensed agents, with a focus on multiple asset classes and a growing
number of service lines.

The office, which is based in Elmwood Park, has also built that platform with the help of Lee &
Associates’ distinctive broker-owned model.

“It’s a unique structure that allows the brokers to go do their job without a lot of oversight and
bureaucracy,” said Lynch, the CEO of Lee & Associates New Jersey. “Nobody is really telling them
how to operate and they get to retain large shares of the commissions through splits, they get to
become partners in the company and get to share in the profits of the company.”

Admittedly, both Lynch and Marchisio initially balked at the prospect of joining Lee & Associates,
yet both had reasons to be intrigued. While it had grown to nearly 40 offices by that time, Lee &
Associates had lacked a presence in New Jersey since its former affiliate, Klatskin Associates, was
acquired by JLL in 2007.

For his part, Marchisio had been leading Grubb & Ellis’ New Jersey office for several years and
saw the firm trying to keep pace with its larger competitors, which meant a move away from the
middle market.

“I recognized as a local branch manager that it was a tall order,” said Marchisio, who would
become president of Lee & Associates New Jersey. “I wanted to stay in the middle market and
Lee was a great opportunity to do that.”

Lynch’s company at the time, Commercial Realty Associates, had been operating since 1995 with
a focus on landlord representation, property management and other services. His son and
daughter, Jason Lynch and Jessica Vasil, had become key figures in the Union-based business
when the opportunity with Lee & Associates came about in late 2008.

Marchisio was “not ready for a startup” after so many years in the industry, but he and Lynch
saw the potential to leverage the existing, established business at Commercial Realty Associates
in order to introduce the Lee & Associates brand to New Jersey.

Lee’s business structure also proved to be a deciding factor. The 100 percent broker-owned firm
operates more as a co-op as opposed to a top-down corporation or even a franchise, Lynch said,
noting that the corporate entity “exists only to serve the local offices.”
That means its brokers are not paying a percentage of their commissions to the corporate
office.

“It’s not a profit center for anybody,” he said. That made it an attractive proposition for the three
founding principals — which included Marchisio and Brian and Jason Lynch — with Vasil joining
as an executive president.

“Once I looked at it and understood it, I realized nobody in corporate is going to tell us how to
run our business,” Lynch added. “It’s a collaborative, entrepreneurial-type structure.”
Of course, the team was contending with the immediate aftermath of the real estate downturn
when it launched the office in 2009. But that proved to be an opportunity, as banks were
foreclosing on properties and in need of property management services.

“It was challenging,” Lynch said, but the firm began to work with lenders and would go on to
handle nearly 100 receivership assignments during the downturn.

“That was very instrumental in our success and riding out those initial years,” he said. “It was
also very helpful that we were now able to feed some of these opportunities to our brokers that
joined us, so we were able to give them an opportunity when the market was dead and we said,
"Now we have distressed assets for you to dispose of or to lease up. ”

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