Cresa Executive Taps Investigative Skills to Build National Data Center Practice
Michael Morris got his start in the first dot-com boom
Finding accurate data in the highly competitive data center sector takes a seasoned team that can broker confidential information as well as handle the full lifecycle of complex property deals. Michael Morris, an industry veteran who launched Newmark's data center practice roughly two decades ago, is looking to build that same high-power business at Cresa, a national brokerage that historically has focused solely on representing tenants and other building occupiers.
"What's unique about the data center industry is that it's a completely inefficient real estate marketplace," Morris said in an interview with CoStar News. "There's no transparent data in the public domain about building availability, power rates, transaction terms or conditions."
To find and interpret reliable data in real estate's hottest but most secretive sector, Morris taps his experience doing more than 1,000 data center sales, leases and development projects across the globe over more than 25 years in the industry. He spends much of his day talking to contacts across the globe — utility operators, engineers, local planning officials and tech executives.
From coast to coast and beyond, Morris and his team piece together information on land, water and power availability, electricity substation latency, local zoning laws and potential community resistance to projects.
"It's an extremely information-sensitive industry, and you really need to be involved with all types of transactions to fully understand the market," Morris said.
Morris was lured by the chance to launch another full-service data center business and build a team at Cresa. Over the past two years, the firm has aggressively expanded beyond its tenant-rep roots by hiring and buying companies in data analytics, project management and national tenant portfolio management.
Morris, who works in Cresa's Manhattan offices and lives in Westchester, brought Newmark colleagues Sumner Putnam and associate Matt Deutsch with him to Cresa. He has already hired more than a half-dozen professionals since last summer and plans to add up to 15 more this year.