Building Stronger CRE Careers and Better Property Performance

Drew Hall: Welcome back to the Peak Property Performance Podcast. I am your co-host Drew Hall, and alongside me, of course, Bill Douglas. Bill, welcome.

Bill Douglas: Great to be here as always, Drew.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, okay, Bill, I've got a good feeling about today's episode. I think we're going to have some good energy and it's not just because of our energy, it's because of our guest. But let me hold on that tease for just a second. So before we do introduce our guest, we just want to remind all our listeners to like, subscribe, share. We've been lectured internally that we need you to hit that bell as well, because that makes a difference and lets you know that we dropped some new content. That's important. But we're out here just spreading the word on the Peak Property Performance movement.

Drew Hall: And ideally, and hopefully we're changing an industry. We're actually making changes. That's, we're not just Talking for the purpose of talking doesn't burn that much in terms of calories. So if you think you'd provide value as a guest here, we welcome CRE thought leaders from all stages of ownership and operation. Just reach out to us via the website peakpropertyperformance.com. It's probably the best way to do it, or hit us up on LinkedIn. It's all good. So we look forward to hearing from you there as well.

Bill Douglas: Well, our guest today is Marcy Moneypenny. And Marcy, before I read your intro, say hello to everybody.

Marcy Moneypenny: Hello, everybody.

Bill Douglas: Hello, everybody. She is... Marcy's very low energy, so I don't know how else to say that. Marcy's the founder of The Moneypenny Collective, a strategic advisory practice focused on helping people in commercial real estate build stronger careers with a particular emphasis on advancing women in the industry. Before launching her own firm, Marcy spent decades in commercial real estate, including time at CBRE, global client management work, and running a Denver brokerage office through the pandemic. Sure, there's some good stories there. She brings the kind of practical, human-centered perspective that matters when owners and operators are trying to make better decisions, but are dealing with real organizational resistance. So, Marcie, I've been excited about this one. Welcome to the show.

Marcy Moneypenny: Thank you. I'm excited to be here and kind of spend some time with you and Drew.

Bill Douglas: You're a hard person to get scheduled. So, I, we, we've done 2 or 3 iterations and we're all 3 on the same screen in the same day.

Drew Hall: So, That's a win. Yeah, exactly. Put that in the W column, is checked. Okay, Marcy, let's start with your CRE operating map. So kind of give us the operating map of your career. Like what parts of commercial real estate have you engaged in and what led you to build the Moneypenny Collective?

Marcy Moneypenny: Okay, awesome. Well, when I was 3 years old, I'm just kidding. I'm not going that far back, but I started actually in commercial real estate as a single mom with a 3-year-old back in the day and started Started off my career with Hines, which at the time it was just a paycheck. I didn't know what a great firm Hines was, but have been in, went from Hines and I've worked at Cushman and Lincoln and CB and then ended my career within the institutional side with Avison Young at the end, April of 2025. During that career, I would characterize it as client management was my major. Throughout my career, and I've been in property management, I've worked in construction management, I've worked in leasing, worked with capital markets teams. With leasing, that would be landlord agency and then tenant reps. So quite frankly, I think the only thing I haven't done is sold an office building.

Marcy Moneypenny: I've been associated, whether by teams or running a division or whatever, over 35 years. When I left CB, which was A great opportunity. I got a PhD in commercial real estate there. I was the global lead for the Morgan Stanley account, and that was awesome. And then I left CB and I wanted to put my fingerprints all over something a little bit different and left CB in January of 2020 and then started with Avison Young March 2nd of 2020, 2 weeks before the pandemic shut down everything. Yeah, but you know what? The thing about it is, I don't mean this as ego. I didn't want anybody else being the quarterback of that office. I figured between brokerage and all the different lines of business and operations that I felt like a really qualified person to be able to do that.

Marcy Moneypenny: And when actually, when Avison Young hired me, I was the first female managing director in North America. So there you go. I'm glad I had that opportunity, but I was there for 5 years, my contract, and then I left at the end of April and then May 1st founded the Moneypenny Collective. I told leadership at AY that I wanted to leave to start my own firm to work with women in our industry who I still think are underrepresented and underserved, oftentimes by their own hand and sometimes just by, you know, markets and the firm you work for or the division or whatever. But I want to see what I can do to improve their careers in an industry that I love and doing that one career at a time. So there you go. That's me in a nutshell.

Drew Hall: Oh, that is brilliant. I mean, my third bullet here was to ask you about that very thing right there. I just moved it up to my first bullet. When you say that, like improving the industry one career at a time, like unpack that a little bit. How do you think about that? That's, that's really cool.

Marcy Moneypenny: Well, I've been most of the women in our industry at one time or another and have run into some of the things that they have, but I also am an odd duck. All day long. Anybody will agree with you on that, is that I love working in a male-dominated industry. I grew up a tomboy. Hanging out with the guys is something I'm comfortable with. But what I've found is I've never competed in my mind with a male in our industry. The only person I've ever competed against has been myself. So bringing that to help women feel like they can improve their confidence, we can improve their visibility, their communication in a way that they can articulate their thoughts and what they want and be able to ask it without being afraid of hearing the word no.

Marcy Moneypenny: And for me, I don't hear no. I hear no, comma, not yet. And so those are some of the things just to help women who haven't had anyone come alongside them and say, I've been there, I've done that. Let me tell you what I've learned.

Drew Hall: Yeah, that's great. That's great. Well, I mean, I'm gonna ask what patterns you've seen. I mean, one of them I feel like you've already alluded to, which is male dominated, but like what patterns have you seen across these different verticals and roles that you've worked in?

Marcy Moneypenny: Patterns as far as, uh, with people working together, it could be absolutely anything.

Bill Douglas: Because I mean, I think that you would focus on addressing with a client, say, what kind of pattern would you recognize after all of the experience in the industry that you could improve?

Marcy Moneypenny: Right. Well, honestly, one of the things I've found is that there are specific types of female clients I absolutely love working with. And those are typically women who are frustrated or feel like their careers have stalled. They've tried everything and nothing is working. What's difficult is working with someone who doesn't like their job, doesn't like their firm, doesn't like anything, and then blames it on the firm, their boss, whatever, because they haven't taken responsibility for their career. So working with women, and I've, I have male clients who have taken full responsibility for their career, but whatever they've been trying hasn't worked. And so that's been brokers. Um, that's been fractional COOs.

Marcy Moneypenny: It's been property management. It's been sustainability. It's been marketing professionals across the board and every, thank goodness, every person is unique in what they want. So there is no combination, quite frankly, no pattern because everybody has had different experiences with, in different markets, in different sectors, in different levels within a firm. And so you really have to take the person apart because I love taking things apart, seeing what works and what doesn't, and then putting it back together so that person has a career strategy that will work. But taking it apart is really an important part of the strategy work that I do because you, it's my opinion, you can't separate the human being from the professional. They just, they intersect so clearly and oftentimes have merged so solidly that it's hard to see the difference. And again, we, there are things we need to unpack.

Bill Douglas: RC, on our preparatory call, I think you said specifically you can't split the baby between personal and professional.

Marcy Moneypenny: You can't.

Bill Douglas: So you just, you keep feeding into the next question. So how does that belief shape the way you advise people in commercial real estate, regardless of whether it's a client, man or woman, young or old, it doesn't matter. How, how does that mindset help you advise?

Marcy Moneypenny: Well, it's for me, whenever I meet someone and they just want to get on a call and get to know each other better, I always start off with the human side because we'll get to the business. We'll get to the professional. It's important to know, where did you grow up? Are you the middle kid? Were you the, you know, the oldest? Were you the youngest? Did you have any siblings? And tell me about mom and dad and not in an invasive way, but in a way of wanting to get to know what motivates that person and what are some of the things that they're not ready to talk about yet. But my hope is we get there because it could be helpful professionally. And so we talk about those things and sometimes there will be some aha moments in a You know, in a conversation or two later about, well, you mentioned this. Do you know this person sounds very much like your boss? Is that why there's a disconnect there? And it's like light bulbs go off and it's some fun, fun stuff when you can help someone put the past in the past and enjoy some freedom for the future.

Bill Douglas: I'm a big believer that work-life balance is a, it's a facade. We're all the same people. We're all doing the same thing. Yes, I work. Yes, I live, but I'm still just me. Like, I'm the same person all the time. So for the CRE leaders that don't believe that or don't try to do that, uh, what do they miss when they separate their personal and their professional life? What do they miss in their professional performance by separating the bond you just talked about, people first?

Marcy Moneypenny: You know, I don't think you really can separate those. I think there are parts of you as a a husband, a father, a son, that when you go to work, that comes with you. Some of your experiences, where you stand in the family, that you're, you know, you take care of a family, you do this, you do that. And a lot of that comes into your professional career. That's one of the things, quite frankly, I'm enjoying about LinkedIn is watching people not only talk about professionally what they're doing, but every once in a while getting a personal glimpse into who they are. But I don't know. I'm with you on the work balance. That's up to the individual.

Marcy Moneypenny: You know, there are some people that they're raising young kids. They're in a much different situation than perhaps you and I are. And I don't know your situation, Drew, but it could be, or people who don't have children or people who aren't married. So work-life balance is going to look different from them. But to me, Bill Douglas and Drew Hall, to me, the human shows up first. And then we get to see what an awesome professional you are.

Bill Douglas: It goes to trust and it shows up in a lot of performance. But Drew and I wove it into the culture of the company too. I think it came out in the book, you know, like live first. I love my work, but I do it to enable my life, not the other way around. My identity is not my work.

Marcy Moneypenny: Right. You know, there was an old, there's a saying that baby boomers live to work and then younger generations work to live. So there, you know, it kind of just depends on what's important to you and where do you think you best serve.

Bill Douglas: I think you just called me young, Marcy. I'll take it.

Drew Hall: Yeah, for real.

Marcy Moneypenny: Why not? Take it.

Bill Douglas: No, I concur on all your points. Thank you for sharing that.

Marcy Moneypenny: Sure. Absolutely.

Drew Hall: Well, and it's cool too, because I mean, what it draws to my mind is, you know, my wife and I have been married for just over 25 years. And I so vividly remember the first time I met her grandfather because we were picking him up from the airport. And he looked at me with such intent. And he said, Drew, do you love what you do? And it wasn't just, I'm blowing off some time here. Let's just chat since we're in the car. It felt like a genuine question. Like he wanted to know the answer. And I paused and thought, I said, I said, you know what, I, I like what I do.

Drew Hall: I don't know if I'd say I love it. I think I'm good at it. This was 25 years ago. And it just stuck with me all this time. And his answer was, I encourage you to keep looking for the thing that you love. And then it was just, you know, it was more of that. Well, we've all heard you'll never work a day in your life, that kind of thing, which it's one of the many things that are their trite isms, their truisms Until they're not, right? There's, there's truth behind them. And if you don't believe that, then you just haven't experienced it yet.

Drew Hall: Yeah.

Marcy Moneypenny: See, I'm fortunate. I have always loved commercial real estate when I was young in the business. And I was actually back in the day, they called them building secretaries. We wouldn't dare use that term today. I was a building secretary and I took all the tenant calls and all of that and eventually became a property manager. But I worked with capital markets and agency leasing on the investor side of the business. And I loved that tribe. I love how that DNA worked really well with my DNA.

Marcy Moneypenny: And it just was something that I found my place really early in my career. And there have been really hard, I mean, we've all been through hard times depending on cycles and all of that. And it really tested our love for the industry or not. But I feel like majority of my career, I've been living my best life. So I'm very fortunate.

Drew Hall: That's great. That is great. Okay. Let's shift a little bit here and think about, talk about commercial real estate's resistance to better decisions. So you've said that it can sometimes feel like it's still operating, commercial real estate is still operating in the 20th century, you know, with that mentality of, well, we've always done it this way. Why is that still so prevalent in so many, I would, I wouldn't even say nooks and crannies. I mean, it's still pretty prevalent out there. We've always done it this way.

Drew Hall: Why do you think that is, that it's still prevalent?

Marcy Moneypenny: I mean, I think most people would say commercial real estate can be very prehistoric. I mean, if it, in my, from what I've watched, you know, processes and procedures haven't changed that much that really the pandemic introduced video calls, podcasts, things of that nature for us to be able to communicate with one another and then also communicate our thoughts out in a different way. That hadn't been really done before. There were conference calls, but they certainly weren't video calls like they were during the pandemic. So I think the pandemic, with all of the things that were really hard about it, it brought some things to light for commercial real estate. And what, when I was at CB, I was part of a group called Client Care, and I was responsible for the top 12 markets in the country of going in and working with already successful professionals on how to be even more successful with how they worked with clients. And quite frankly, there was one market who will remain nameless, who I kept making the, uh, setting up these conference calls with this individual and he kept canceling. So finally I got on the plane and I flew to his office and I was just, I'm here.

Marcy Moneypenny: Another, can't get rid of me. I'm here in person now. And as we sat and talked, I said, what you don't understand is you don't want to be a dinosaur before your time. I'm here to help you become even more successful than you already are. And I want to show you some things that perhaps you haven't considered before. totally changed their relationship is looking through a different lens that sure, all of these things might've served you well up until now, but there's also a saying, what got you here won't get you there. And so we can't rely on one skillset our entire career, because think about all of the different, again, cycles we've been through in markets and whatnot. If we applied the same expertise in one, and tried to do it and all the others, our clients would be so mismanaged.

Marcy Moneypenny: They're looking for the best and the fastest and what is present-day working. So it's kind of how I see it.

Drew Hall: Okay.

Marcy Moneypenny: Yeah.

Drew Hall: So can you think of some, an example or two where you have seen in this, in the people development that you're talking about driving so much, where you've seen newer leaders, younger leaders, even women professionals in your case, right? Where they are out there challenging operating assumptions?

Marcy Moneypenny: All the time. Yeah.

Drew Hall: Nice.

Bill Douglas: Do tell. I mean, really do tell.

Marcy Moneypenny: It's funny. I, one time when I was at CB, I called the CEO about something that I had heard was going on as far as training for leaders and called him. And I knew him because I was on the board of the women's network at CB and had come to know him, certainly wasn't friendly with him, but come to know him. And I called and said, I understand that you're giving this kind of training for leaders. Is it for people who are already leaders or those like myself who want to become leaders in the firm? It was very quiet. And then he said, you know, you're tenacious. And I said, sir, that's what you pay me for.

Drew Hall: Nice.

Marcy Moneypenny: So, I mean, you know, if you don't ask, you don't get. And so I hear more and more of my female colleagues, young colleagues, I remind them, ask for what you want. If you don't understand, ask questions. You're never too old in this business, um, to keep pushing the line of where we need to go. Or again, going back to your previous question, we don't ever move forward. So we have to be asking the uncomfortable questions. We need to ask why, not because we're questioning, but we want to understand. And that's the best way I know to really be able to make an impact in our industry.

Drew Hall: That's really good. I mean, that may actually be the answer to this question that I was about to ask you. Like how to, how to introduce new ideas without making those experienced leaders feel like, you know, everything that's been done is wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. And I hear what you're saying, like asking questions and that almost feels like a sort of a humble approach, right?

Marcy Moneypenny: Yeah. Well, you have to honor the individual for what they've brought to the industry so far and not discount it, but ask them to partner with you going forward. For the future, because you need their expertise, their background, their understanding to help take the sharp edges off of what you're thinking about for the future. So it has to be a partnership.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Okay. So let me lay out some categories or some options for resistance and see if any of these resonate. Like, oh yeah, I've seen this. Yep. That's pretty common. Resistance from things like incentives, because certain incentives that exist out there, maybe from vendors or whatnot, or the organizational structure, or just being risk-averse or comfort. With the familiar.

Drew Hall: I mean, are those, are these all resonating as reality?

Marcy Moneypenny: Yeah, to some degree, I think for all of us, I'm trying to think which one I want to tackle. Is it, um, I would say one of the things I hear people pushing back on is cross-selling, uh, within a firm or bringing others with them in front of a client because they have to be really confident in those other professionals that they're going to be at the same level, understand what whoever is leading the charge is trying to do. But cross-selling, quite frankly, makes everybody look smarter. You're not waiting for the client to say, can I meet your capital markets? I mean, one of the things I loved to do when I was running property management was when, before we started budget meetings, bring capital markets in. First of all, it gave them a chance to start a relationship with that owner for a future sale sometime, but also tell the owner what you're seeing. What do you see in the building where maybe there could be some capital expended? Give them some insights. And I'd also want a tenant rep to join us who could tell us about the current market and what other buildings are offering and what he's seen the tenants are looking for. What you're doing is really educating your client, whether it's an owner, asset manager, whoever it is, by giving them more information than waiting for them to ask questions.

Marcy Moneypenny: Yeah, I love that. for it. So I think that's really important. I do know that some firms have initiatives of making sure you include this platform or this system or whatever. And those can be tough. I think it, some of those apply to certain lines of business and other lines of business, it might not benefit as much, but you have to learn it. I'm assuming that's why they joined that firm for that platform. Those are my thoughts.

Bill Douglas: Marcie, in our prep call, you made a point that I really like. You said regardless of the expected hold period. And people should walk onto a property with a mindset that someday it will need to be sold. And by walk onto the property, I'm talking about, you know, management and ownership. What changes when you operate an asset that way? Because I don't see that very often. So I know the answer, but I want you to explain it because you're, you have a lot more experience in this space.

Marcy Moneypenny: Well, I'm hoping my answer is what you think my answer is going to be. So here's what I've found is if you don't take a mentality of the minute you walk into a property that we're preparing it for sale, everybody gets to a certain point where they're just maintaining the property. They're just running it. They're not thinking creatively about how to improve this or how do we introduce another revenue stream to the owner? How are we going to deal with the common areas, the hallways, things of that nature? But also one of the things I've found that is really makes clients stop is when you get together with capital markets and your agency leasing team and look at the checklist that capital markets typically has of how they prepare an asset for sale, of getting it ready to market. Tenant estoppels is one of my favorites because, okay, the building just sold. They know which tenants are happy, which tenants have questions, which tenants aren't happy, but they signed it anyway. Those are the tenants that you start targeting right away to do something with those relationships, to improve them, to turn them around, to solidify them so that you have, you're working with part as partners with them. And then when you're working with agency lease, pricing, capital markets, marketing, research.

Marcy Moneypenny: You make sure that you're finding out what the market is doing, who's improving their building in this way, but you're always on your toes so that when the client comes in town, there's nothing that used to upset me more when I'd hear from some of my direct reports, well, we have to get the building ready. Really?

Bill Douglas: Capital markets teams are extremely disciplined, right? When an asset goes to market. But what does preparing for the sale from day one look like in property management? and leasing and client services, not capital markets. So talk about the difference there.

Marcy Moneypenny: Well, capital markets, different, but it's just very easy once you win the... make the sale, win the bid, win the presentation, to take it over and then just business as usual. To me, it was always really important, property management and agency leasing, to differentiate from day one and talk with the owner, go through the building inspection report, What was there? Let's put together a timeline for discussions about that. And don't sit back and wait for someone to ask you to do something. Always bring up what you want to be working on. Make sure that you have it documented in writing that we wanted to do this. You didn't want to do that this year, but it was something we discussed. So you're always trying to move the ball down the field. And when the client comes in, in town.

Marcy Moneypenny: He could show up anytime. She could make a drop-in and the building is running as it should. It's not getting the building ready. What does that mean? What were you not doing that you should have been doing?

Bill Douglas: We're admittedly biased because Drew and I talk about this on the show with almost every guest, but how can operators identify hidden savings or operational issues or new revenue line items, for instance, years before a transaction?

Marcy Moneypenny: Okay. When you say just doing it in due diligence, you're talking about,

Bill Douglas: Just paying attention to those in diligence. Why would you, I mean, we see the industry focus on it in diligence. We're going to put the building on the market and then it's a fire drill to fine-tune the operations and to maximize the rent rolls. Like, how can operators identify that in a normal day or month or quarter or year versus the fire drill in the 100 days prior to sale?

Marcy Moneypenny: Well, first of all, the 100 days before the sale, there's a good chance that the building's going to be sold. there's a good chance there's so many deferred maintenance items, they're going to cost so much more. But if you'd just been doing it over time, I'm just, let's just, I'm making this up, power washing. I had a client who deferred power washing and power washing, and I knew what the amount was. He pulled out of the budget every year, but when he wanted to get the, which was always documented, when we got ready before putting the building on the market, and I said, this is the cost to power wash all the walkways, the parking garage, da da da da da. He goes, my God, that's astronomical. And I said, well, this was the cost if we had done it over a period of time. And so, you know, and not in a way like shame on you, you didn't listen to me, but this is kind of the reality.

Marcy Moneypenny: And what I would do when I would be explaining that to the client is deferred maintenance will always cost you more. It doesn't mean that you just put the cost off. The cost is going to be more because time has had That's great.

Drew Hall: That's true on a personal level too, right?

Marcy Moneypenny: Yeah. That's very true.

Bill Douglas: Time takes an expensive toll.

Marcy Moneypenny: Yes. Yeah. But I mean, to me, you're given this opportunity to make a difference and, and to really serve a client. You've got to be the optimistic, persistent person on what they need to be doing on a routine basis. So they don't even have to think about your building or portfolio. And that's where, before you, Someone mentioned trust. That's how it's built. They know that you're actually thinking like an owner, not just somebody who's managing a property.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Okay. Marcy, this is all good. This has been great conversation, but no more.

Marcy Moneypenny: Okay.

Drew Hall: We shift. So we always do this thing at the end called the extra floor where it's not conversational. It's more like just a quickfire, a few questions, gut answer. What comes to your mind first?

Bill Douglas: So the audience gets to know you. Yeah.

Drew Hall: So we're going to shift to personal now.

Marcy Moneypenny: Okay.

Drew Hall: I mean, and I guess we did it backward, right? I mean, we talked about this at the top. We should, we should know better. We're doing personal at the end. Oh man. Okay. But hey, we're doing it. So we get points. So number 1, what would you, what would you say is a great piece of career or life advice that you've received?

Marcy Moneypenny: Be authentic.

Bill Douglas: Excellent. What's one habit or practice that consistently makes you more Loving people.

Marcy Moneypenny: I love to serve. And so serving other people has been a great joy.

Drew Hall: Very cool. Okay. Last one, Marcie. Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Marcy Moneypenny: Early bird. 5 o'clock.

Drew Hall: Yeah.

Bill Douglas: Yeah. Be surprised how many people on the show are not.

Marcy Moneypenny: Oh, not this one.

Bill Douglas: 50/50. But yeah, I agree. Marcie, this has been great. I know we'll have this in the show notes, but tell our listeners how they could reach out to you should they choose.

Marcy Moneypenny: Okay. Uh, LinkedIn, all over it. Don't hesitate to look up Marcy Moneypenny and it's Marcy with a Y and Moneypenny is one word and it's spelled just like it sounds. And then my website is marcy moneypenny.com. Who knew?

Bill Douglas: So the one and only.

Marcy Moneypenny: Yeah. Yeah. And if you need to reach out to me, I'm mm@marcymoneypenny.com.

Drew Hall: Yeah.

Bill Douglas: Well, Marcy, thank you so much.

Drew Hall: Thank you so much.

Bill Douglas: Thank you to all the listeners. And like Drew said at the top of the hour or 40 minutes, whatever this is, be sure and follow, like, subscribe, click the bell, everything you could do to further the message and invite other people to listen to it and to be on the show. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Peak Property Performance.

Marcy Moneypenny: Thank you.