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John Dolan
John Dolan
Title: Senior vice president, McCall & Almy
Age: 40
Industry experience: 12 years
A positive outlook and a ready gift of gab have served John Dolan well as a commercial real estate broker and an announcer for teams ranging from the Boston College football squad to the New York Knicks. Dolan, a Scituate native, switched careers from sales to commercial brokerage in 2007 when he joined the former Colliers Meredith & Grew, and joined tenant representation specialists McCall & Almy six years ago. Dolan is finishing up his year-long tenure as president of the Commercial Brokers Assoc., the 391-member arm of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board that represents the commercial real estate industry.
Q: What prompted you to make the career switch to CRE?
A: I just liked the idea of working downtown and working on a team. I like being out and about. I had been in a sales job before, and while I enjoyed it, it was very desk-confining. Commercial real estate gives you the ability to be entrepreneurial and meet new people as well. At Meredith & Grew, I was representing landlords 80 percent of the time. I was on a team of four people, including Jim Elcock, on the suburban 128 market and enjoyed it. It was a great way to get to learn buildings, what people think about when they came to look at space, and how to try to sell space that even I knew wouldn’t lease in a reasonable period of time. At least I got in before the recession. Suburban was one of the most successful departments at Meredith & Grew during the recession. It taught me a lot of about being resilient. When other faces around you were negative, you had to keep a positive outlook. At McCall & Almy, we’re all focused on occupiers. We’re a salary-bonus shop, so it gives us a chance to pull in different backgrounds and expertise, and we all share in the rewards at the end. We want to make sure our clients understand we’re focused on the long-term view.
Q: What tech advance has had the biggest effect on how brokers do their jobs?
A: ViewTheSpace has been one of the biggest tech influencers over the last six years. They started out doing online property tours and have evolved into a complete software suite for landlord representation. With the amount of reporting that goes into representing landlords, especially with so many institutional investors involved and reporting to their funding sources, it’s important that everybody be on the same page. You can view the aggregate space available, know the rent roll, communicate directly to the asset manager, log all the showings, show your marketing activity and even do proposals through the software. It’s been instrumental in helping people represent landlords. On the tenant rep side, there are Truss and Occupier. Those are starting to roll out in the marketplace, but overall, I think our industry is ripe for some sort of disruption. We’re just not sure where it’s going to come from.
John Dolan
Q: What CBA-sponsored programs get the best response and what areas are brokers looking for the most guidance with education and professional development?
A: The one that gets the best response is our awards dinner, and that’s never going to change. For educational topics, it rotates year and year out. We’re tried to be different and looked at dissecting lab space. People are fascinated by that. What’s the technology that goes into lab space, how is a building built to accommodate lab space, especially when there’s so much being pushed out from Cambridge into the suburbs. Anytime a finance topic comes up, people are interested. And regional topics as well. Next year we’re going to roll out a CBA University with a focus on young people who are new to the job basics, so writing proposals, showing space, designing a marketing flier. It’s going to dovetail with a dues reduction, and we’ll be cutting their dues in half if they’re under 35 years old.
Q: Are there more opportunities to move around the local industry with some of the mass personnel moves in recent years?
A: With the consolidation, I’ve seen the bigger firms hire a lot of younger people. There have been a lot of younger folks working on established teams, which is an indicator of the economy but also the strengths of our firms. With the acquisition of the Colliers investment sales team by CBRE, the big are getting bigger and strengthening themselves. Am I convinced that we’re done with the personnel churn? No. How that manifests itself, I’m not sure. Are we going to start to see some people drop out of the larger firms and start their own firm? Or are people more concerned with the platform?
Q: How long has the CBA sponsored a diversity initiative and how is that helping to open up new paths into the industry?
A: The CBA diversity initiative has been around for about six years. Originally, we started on trying to recruit diverse candidates for employment in the industry. While we are moving forward with that initiative, it has expanded significantly in the last year to helping those diverse candidates feel more comfortable in what they do. When we rolled out the Women in Commercial Brokerages panel, we had more than 100 women in attendance to kick off that initiatives. It’s expanded to smaller roundtable discussions for which we’ve gotten some good momentum.
Q: What was your introduction to sports announcing?
A: I’ve been doing some announcing since I was 12 at Scituate Community Television with (“Lost In Space” actor) Mark Goddard and that branched out with WBZ’s Kid Company and did that until I went off to Providence College and started doing public address and hockey games on the radio. You’ve got to have the natural gift of gab. You’ve got to be interested in the topic that you’re covering. I hate to be a rally guy. I hate to be a cheerleader. I want to get people into the game and be informed. I realized you can do that with your voice by your modulation, as opposed to guys who think that screaming into the microphone is the way to whip the crowd into a frenzy. Boston has a more informed group of people who follow sports.
Five Favorite New England Golf Courses:
- The Kittansett Club – Marion
- Wannamoisett Country Club – Rumford, Rhode Island
- Ekwanok Country Club – Manchester, Vermont
- Crumpin-Fox Club – Bernardston
- Hatherly Country Club – Scituate
