How Cushman & Wakefield uncovers warmer opportunities with Affinity

Introduction

Cushman & Wakefield is a leading global real estate services firm that delivers exceptional value for real estate occupiers and owners. Cushman & Wakefield is among the largest real estate services firms with approximately 50,000 employees in over 400 offices and approximately 70 countries. In 2021, the firm had revenue of $9.4 billion across core services of property, facilities and project management, leasing, capital markets, and valuation and other services. 

Cushman & Wakefield turned to Affinity to automate contact and company profiles from inbox and calendar data, enrich profiles with industry data to provide actionable insights, and unify their team’s collective network in one place automatically to help source, manage, and close more CRE deals faster.

Challenge

The commercial real estate industry is competitive and top brokers need to not only maintain their existing relationships, but also be constantly increasing their network and sourcing new quality relationships. Referrals are incredibly powerful, but finding paths to these referrals on social platforms like LinkedIn have limitations and fail to quantify the strength of any given relationship. 

Cushman & Wakefield was experiencing all of this as they continued to scale across the globe. They had no way of leveraging their collective network of relationships to drive more CRE deals.

Solution

Mark McGranahan, Vice Chairman from Cushman & Wakefield chose Affinity to be the source of truth for understanding his team’s collective network. For McGranahan, with years of success in the fiercely competitive San Francisco market, maintaining his brand and ensuring that his team continues to grow their long-standing relationships is incredibly important. Upon signing up, Affinity spun up an instant 360° digital Rolodex of every person and company McGranahan’s team had ever talked to. This allowed them to have a better understanding of who has talked to whom and where there were potential pockets of opportunities.

Affinity also enabled McGranahan’s team to source better referrals and introductions by understanding the actual relationship score between a prospect and key partners. Affinity even augments LinkedIn so you can see more than just the fact that someone has a connection and instead see which team member or partner is best suited to make an introduction.

“We had less than a 50% hit rate on LinkedIn, and with Affinity, it’s improved tremendously. Now we can truly preserve relationship capital.”

Results

By leveraging Affinity, McGranahan’s team activated their collective network and increased visibility into their biggest opportunities. In CRE, your network is your net worth. Affinity ensures McGranahan’s team always maximizes the full potential of their network.

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