Cushman & Wakefield has tapped commercial real estate industry veteran Robert Thornburgh to lead the brokerage's Southwest region. He will spearhead the firm's growth in new and existing markets.
Thornburgh joins Cushman & Wakefield, the world’s third-largest commercial property brokerage, after four years with the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors, or SIOR, a Washington, D.C.-based industry group representing real estate brokers in dozens of countries that started as an effort to help the United States find critical space during World War II.
In his new job, Thornburgh, who's based in Los Angeles, serves as Cushman & Wakefield's regional president overseeing the Southwest region, which includes Southern California, Nevada, Phoenix, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. Thornburgh will head strategic growth of the region, including client service delivery and talent development and recruiting while developing partnerships across the firm’s service lines, said Cushman & Wakefield in a press release.
He will report to Victoria Malkin, who is president of Americas markets, Cushman said.
“His significant experience and expertise of brokerage operations and the fundamentals of our industry combined with his service-oriented approach to clients will help propel our business forward, in the Southwest and across the Americas,” Malkin said in a statement.
Thornburgh began his commercial real estate career in the 1990s, getting his start at R3 Investments, according to his website, an investment company he still owns. He was CEO at Heger Industrial, a regional real estate firm in Southern California that in 2017 merged with Kidder Mathews. As part of the merger, Thornburgh joined the company’s executive leadership team as regional president where he helped to expand the firm’s presence across the West Coast.
As CEO of SIOR, Thornburgh developed a strategy to attract and retain new members and elevated the society's brand recognition throughout the industry, according to the release. Thornburgh served on the organization’s board of directors for more than a decade and held various leadership positions.
In an email to CoStar News, Thornburgh said Cushman & Wakefield has "an incredibly strong foundation" and said his new role is focused on "driving extraordinary outcomes and our ability to think in terms of not just the next few years, but the next decade."
"It is also one of the reasons why vision, positioning, and strategy are so important," he said. "I hope to play a key role in helping drive that."