Preparing to moderate a session with the great Larry Silverstein at Bisnow’s Office Leasing & Development Expo (BOLD), Nov. 20 in NYC, has gotten Pircher, Nichols & Meeks partner Gene Leone in a reflective mood. Gene is appreciative of the attorneys who showed him the way. Everyone needs a good mentor or, as one of his colleagues liked to say, a good rabbi. (Leo Pircher and Madison Grose were two of his.) Loyalty and success follows the mentoring. Just ask Jonathan Mechanic and Rob Ivanhoe, whose leadership and mentoring skills have made them fabulously successful, he says. In today’s Chicago office market, Gene’s noticed foreign buyers adding an extra level of complexity.

He worked on 311 S Wacker, above, which had a "brutal" capital structure. “You don’t have the certainty of execution. It is just harder to bring the foreign investors along and give them the comfort they need to proceed.” Chicago is pretty competitive right now, as investors consider it a gateway city – despite its location in the center of the country. New buildings or old buildings made new, such as 401 N Michigan, continue to be highly attractive to tenants. When he is not working, Gene is ferrying his ten-year-old daughter Adrienne from sport to sport. Gene’s wife Karen was an All American field hockey player at Duke, and Adrienne inherited Mom’s genes. Get your tickets for the industry’s first-ever must-attend national office property summit here.