Michael Joyce has returned to CBRE, where he spent the first four of his more than 25 years in the Boston office brokerage industry.

CBRE hired Joyce, who spent the last six years with Cushman & Wakefield, as vice chair, its highest rank for transaction professionals, the firm announced Thursday.

Joyce had also served as vice chair at C&W. Before that, he co-founded brokerage firm Richards Barry Joyce in 2001 and sold the firm in 2013 to Transwestern. He spent five years with the firm, branded Transwestern RBJ, before leaving for Cushman.

In 2018, Joyce was awarded the Boston Commercial Brokers Association's McCall Leadership Award. In 2019, he was awarded the organization's Office Deal of the Year Award for Greater Cambridge for representing Puma in its 150K SF headquarters lease at Assembly Row in Somerville.

He has represented the Boston Celtics and Boston Consulting Group in deals, according to a release from CBRE. He also represents landlords, including Columbia Property Trust at 116 Huntington Ave., where his team signed 10 leases in 2022 to bring the building to 83% leased.

"Mike is an office and industrial leasing powerhouse with strong relationships from his decades-long career," CBRE Executive Managing Director Michael Affronti said in the release. "He will partner with our capital markets team to leverage those relationships, while mentoring and growing our urban leasing team."

Joyce spoke to Bisnow in December about the state of Boston's office market. He said that while overall leasing volume in 2023 was roughly half of the prior year's total, the list of largest leases signed in the Boston area provided hope for the market's recovery.

"I think this shows really good signs of what the market is and is going to be in the future," he said.