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Civil engineering graduate Rick Putprush ’74 is a commercial real estate broker and vice president of investment sales at the Boston office of Grubb & Ellis, an international commercial real estate services company. He is also a member of the national advisory board of the company’s financial services group.
Putprush received the 2002 Investment Deal of the Year award presented by Boston’s Commercial Brokers Association for one the largest transactions in Boston commercial real estate history. The closing of 501 Boylston Street, on behalf of Metlife, was a $122.6 million sale/leaseback transaction that took six months of complex negotiations.
According to Putprush, the transaction was remarkable as an example of a trend toward unsolicited offers that are then negotiated quietly without ever hitting the market. A simultaneous trend, he says, is of corporate owners taking advantage of investor demands to convert non-performing assets to capital for reinvestment.
“I seem to have developed a skill for selling complicated commercial real estate with specific issues that might otherwise diminish its value, or halt negotiations altogether,” says Putprush. “The ability to recognize value for my clients by working through the resolution of these complications is, I believe, a direct result of an approach to problem solving learned through my civil engineering education at Lafayette.”