EXCLUSIVE: Cresa Names Ray Anderson As CEO, Plots Aggressive Growth

Cresa hired Ray Anderson as its new CEO, dipping into the consulting world to find its next top executive.

Anderson took over from Tod Lickerman, Bisnow can first report, ending a search for a new CEO that began last year. He arrives at Cresa as the occupier-focused brokerage is spending cash to pick up top talent and competing firms. 

“There's a gigantic opportunity for growth,” Anderson said in an interview.

Cresa acquired Dallas-based Fischer, its main rival focused solely on occupiers, in October and is looking to continue building its market share.

“Recruiting is going to be very important, and we're going to continue to be very aggressive, seeking super-high-quality people to come in, and then M&A is something that's second nature to me,” Anderson said. “To the extent that there are opportunities, we will be aggressive about chasing those.”

Anderson comes to Cresa from Ernst & Young’s strategic consulting imprint EY-Parthenon, where he was a senior partner in its value creation group, supporting global enterprise transformations and M&A activity for large public and private firms. 

Before joining EY-Parthenon in 2019, Anderson spent nearly a decade working on M&A, turnarounds and restructurings at Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group.

“Ray’s proven track record in corporate value creation, organizational transformation and M&A on behalf of corporate clients fits well with Cresa’s occupier advocacy mission,” Cresa board Chairman Gary Gregg said in a statement. “His expertise will be a great fit as we pursue additional recruiting and acquisition opportunities.”

Cresa disclosed that management was looking for a new CEO in July, with management saying at the time the search could take up to two years. 

Lickerman remains on Cresa's board of the directors, and Anderson said he’ll continue to have an active role in recruitment and M&A activity. For his part, Anderson said he’s embarking on a six-month listening tour of Cresa’s offices — the Chicago-based firm has a presence in 25 states and Washington, D.C., as well as six Canadian offices — to meet colleagues and gather feedback. 

Cresa is the largest brokerage focused solely on occupiers, with other tenant-focused firms such as Savills also offering services for landlords, and its management is looking to compound growth after recent acquisitions. 

The acquisition of Fischer gave Cresa an expansive portfolio management business to complement its existing operations more focused on individual deals. After the merger, Cresa’s business is now roughly evenly split between the two service lines, Lickerman told Bisnow in October. 

It also gave Cresa access to Fischer's popular proprietary portfolio management software that the brokerage plans to introduce across its portfolio business while investing to build out the software for integration across its entire customer base. 

“We want to make sure that we've got world-class technology supporting our people so they can deliver the best possible service to their client,” Anderson said.

Cresa didn't put a price tag on the Fischer purchase but said it was the largest deal in its three-decade history. It followed a string of smaller buyouts and high-profile hires, including data center veteran Michael Morris and Summer Putnam, who were recruited away from Newmark in July to launch Cresa’s data center capital markets and advisory platform.

Cresa purchased data analytics firm Bluechip Insights in November and, a month later, acquired California-based project management firm CMPG. In September 2024, Cresa bought Philadelphia-based project manager NorthStar Owners Representation and picked up Seattle-based Pacific Program Management a month later.  

Anderson will also guide Cresa's deployment of artificial intelligence across both back-end operations and customer-facing platforms. 

Specialized prompts for existing AI platforms could help brokers quickly analyze large datasets or ensure a bid submission properly addresses all of the requirements, Anderson suggested as potential use cases. For customers, the company is developing AI-integrated search and analysis functionality inside its existing software. 

“We're not talking about science experiments, we're talking about things that meaningfully improve clients’ work product, meaningfully improves the brokers’ productivity and meaningfully improves the business,” Anderson said.