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October 14, 2024 Deal Watch

Prominent Hartford-based property manager RM Bradley gets new leader

HBJ PHOTO | MICHAEL PUFFER Shane Mulready (left) will soon take over as CEO of well-known Hartford property management firm RM Bradley Management Corp. She will replace longtime CEO David Fagone (right) who is headed into semi-retirement.
By Michael Puffer
RM Bradley Management Corp. 
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As a child, Shane Mulready would raid supply closets at her dad’s company, RM Bradley Management Corp., in downtown Hartford’s Gold Building office tower.

From those offices, she would survey the city with binoculars. At one point or another, the company launched by her father — Richard Mulready — managed most of the high-rise buildings on that skyline.

For the majority of her life, Shane Mulready didn’t imagine herself working for her father’s firm full-time, much less running it. Her parents never pressured her to follow in her father’s footsteps.

Even so, Mulready, now 51, joined RM Bradley as a property manager in 2008. Earlier this year, she was elevated to president.

And on Jan. 1, 2025, Mulready will fully take over the firm’s reins, following the semi-retirement of CEO David Fagone — who has headed the company since 2014.

Mulready said she’s up for leading the firm into the future, after having been groomed for the top job for years, gradually taking on more responsibilities. Most recently, she was director of property management for the company’s entire Connecticut portfolio, as well as an executive vice president.

“I think when the day came (when I was named president), it was just kind of like a title change,” Mulready said. “It wasn’t a stark difference that day. It was just a gradual increase in duties. And there will be more to come.”

Smooth transition

Fagone said he will maintain an off-site consulting relationship with the firm for a couple years as a sort of “CEO emeritus.”

“There is a client base that’s known me for 39 years and may not know Shane,” Fagone said. “The strategy is to keep a finger on the pulse and help out where possible and fill any gaps, if there are any, during the transition period.”

Michael Puffer | Hartford Business Journal
Shane Mulready (left) and David Fagone inside the lobby of Goodwin Square, where RM Bradley is based in downtown Hartford.

Fagone joined the company in 1986, when it was called Servus Management Corp. At the time, the firm employed about a dozen people and managed two or three office buildings, Fagone recalled.

Richard Mulready founded his company under the Servus Management name in 1975. In 2008, Servus acquired and absorbed a small Boston-based real estate services and brokerage firm called RM Bradley.

Market testing concluded the RM Bradley name carried wider appeal, so Mulready rebranded his entire firm under that banner.

Today, RM Bradley employs 100 people and manages 6.8 million square feet of space — predominantly office — throughout Connecticut, as well as in Boston and Virginia. In Hartford, it manages the 30-story Goodwin Square office skyscraper and 26-story Gold Building, among others.

RM Bradley is one of the region’s largest property managers. Its competitors include blue-chip commercial real estate companies like CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL and Colliers that offer property management services.

Over the years, the number of private office buildings run by RM Bradley has declined. But those losses have been offset, Fagone said, by a growing number of contracts to manage state-owned buildings, including various judicial branch properties, the state office building at 165 Capitol Ave., and others.

That shift began in the 1990s with a wave of state building manager retirements, he said.

“The competition has sort of come from within, building owners managing from within rather than outsourcing,” Fagone said. “It was just coincidence, but while that was happening, the state of Connecticut was outsourcing building after building after building as they were finding their long-term facilities people retiring.”

The company also maintains a small brokerage arm, with two full-time staff focused primarily on suburban areas around Hartford.

A different path

While attending George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Shane Mulready thought she’d work in government. She had interned for Sen. Christopher Dodd and majored in government and politics.

In her sophomore year, Mulready was hired as a part-time usher at the university’s Patriot Center arena. Within months of graduation, she was hired for a full-time job in the box office. By the time she left in 2008, she was director of arena and event management.

In that role Mulready coordinated events ranging from concerts to college sports, overseeing every aspect of logistics and execution from “load-in” to “load-out.” That meant arranging staffing, sequencing the arrival of equipment trucks, sizing the stage and organizing vendors, among many other tasks.

It was hectic, but there was a great sense of accomplishment at the conclusion of every event.

“It was fun and great,” Mulready said. “I learned a lot about people, about business and about working very long hours.”

Those 80-hour workweeks were tough on a single mother, however. So, in 2008, at age 35, Mulready took a property manager job at RM Bradley, something that offered more consistent and reasonable hours. Moving back to Connecticut and closer to family was another motivator.

In a few years, Mulready began to imagine herself taking the company’s helm.

“Family brought me back,” Mulready said. “Dad started this company when I was 3. I think I had a sense it shouldn’t go to someone else. He built this and we never had a want in the world he couldn’t provide for us. I felt it should be someone in the family who carried on.”

'In the family'

Richard Mulready was a prominent state legislator representing West Hartford. He was also a developer who built, among other properties, the 12-story, nearly 300,000-square-foot Metro Center office building in downtown Hartford in 1986. The development business experienced deep highs and lows. Today, RM Bradley doesn’t manage ground-up construction but will oversee interior renovations.

Mulready said her father taught her to treat employees like family and to trust them. Richard Mulready retired in 2016, but still maintains the title of company chairman.

Fagone recalled a conversation with Richard Mulready about a decade ago, when the company founder asked him if he could spend the coming decade getting Shane ready to take over management.

“He envisioned keeping the company in the family,” Fagone said.

Fagone, 65, plans to keep his home in Simsbury, although semi-retirement will allow for even longer extended weekend stays at his Cape Cod cottage. He also plans to spend time practicing guitar, a passion he picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It is time for a change,” Fagone said. “Having done this for 39 years, it’s been a great ride, a great experience, and we have done some really great things in our company.”

The COVID challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily emptied office buildings across Connecticut and beyond. Longer term, it has prompted a spike in office vacancy rates with the rise of remote work options. But, RM Bradley’s property management business did not take a hit, Fagone said, because even empty spaces need to be maintained.

“It’s interesting how the pandemic hasn’t changed our company,” Fagone said. “We worked through it almost exclusively because someone needs to make sure the buildings are lit, safe and clean, whether people are coming or going. Frankly, we find large buildings more vulnerable to problems when they are empty than when they are full.”

Leaks and other problems are not noticed as quickly in empty spaces, creating possible delays in cost-saving maintenance.

“Our clients did not dial back on our services,” Fagone said. “We were lucky and appreciative of that. But I think that’s a two-way street. I think clients saw the need for the type of services we brought them in those days.”

Looking forward

While RM Bradley might not have taken an immediate hit from the pandemic, it is keeping a wary eye on longer-term effects.

Landlords and building owners struggling with low occupancy and rising costs might decide to bring upkeep and leasing activities in-house, Fagone noted. RM Bradley’s path forward, he said, is to prove it can provide strategies that blunt rising costs.

Shane Mulready said RM Bradley will continue to bid for maintenance of more state office buildings, but she realizes that’s a finite pool of possible work.

In September, the company hired Shane’s brother, Sean Mulready, as director of new business development in order to proactively seek new clients. RM Bradley could expand its out-of-state reach and branch into new property types, she said.

“I think we thankfully have been able to grow steadily over the past 49 years,” Mulready said. “The goal is to continue to do so, to keep providing jobs for our people and keep gaining contracts one-by-one and doing what we do to the best of our abilities.”

RM Bradley Management Corp.

Industry: Property management

Top Executives: David Fagone, CEO; Shane Mulready, President, Incoming CEO

HQ: 225 Asylum St., 15th Floor, Hartford

Employees: 100

Website: www.rmbradley.com

Contact: 860-278-2040

Properties under management: 6.8 million square feet, predominantly office, in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia

 

 

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