Park Madison Partners’ Nancy Lashine on Finding Balance and Lessons Learned in Leadership

The most recent data on women in real estate shows that women represent 36.7 percent of the commercial real estate industry, a stagnant figure that has not changed in 15 years, according to a CREW study. Progress has occurred in other areas, though. The number of young women in commercial real estate is increasing, more women are in brokerage positions than ever before, and a greater number of women aspire to be in the C-suite.

Women in leadership roles was the theme of a discussion during the 2024 ULI Spring Conference in New York City. Kelly Nagel, who was recently named head of residential at EDENS, an owner and operator of mixed-used properties nationwide, hosted a fireside chat with Nancy Lashine, founder and managing partner at Park Madison Partners, a New York–based boutique advisory and capital-raising firm.

The wide-ranging discussion delved Lashine’s career in real estate and what led her to join the industry, the ups and downs of starting a business, the importance of relationships in real estate, and how to strike the right balance between career goals and family life. The session was presented as part of the ULI Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI), a program that launched in 2011 with the goal of increasing both the visibility and the ranks of women leaders in real estate.

ULI

Whereas Lashine is now a seasoned executive with more than three decades of experience in the industry, real estate was not on her radar during college. Instead she followed her passion for the arts and graduated with a degree in dance. Not long thereafter, she began working at Young & Rubicam to help write manuals for DOS computer systems. Her work took her to Paris, where she sold accounting systems, but she wanted to quit and join a dance company in Manhattan. A meal with her father at Grand Central Oyster Bar made her reconsider, however. She applied to business school and got her MBA from Columbia University. That’s when she got her first taste of what the commercial real estate industry was like. “The most interesting people were in real estate,” Lashine said.

After cutting her teeth at the O’Connor Group, Lashine found herself at somewhat of a crossroads. She had three children, worked 80-hour weeks, and commuted to the office 5 days a week. Balancing family and work felt too difficult, so she quit—but it didn’t last long. After a friend nudged her in a new direction by having business cards printed for her that read “Lashine Group,” she began consulting, a venture that lasted a decade and had her advising companies including Lehman Brothers, Angelo Gordon, and ING Clarion on product development and institutional marketing initiatives. When she launched the firm she still works for today—Park Madison Partners, named after her father’s coffee shop—her oldest child was heading off to college. She was still trying to find the proper balance, and the timing seemed right. Life, she has learned over the years, is all about compromise. “You can have it all, you just can’t have it all at the same time,” Lashine said.

During the discussion, moderator Nagel polled the crowd about who was interested in starting their own business, and a good share of attendees raised their hands. Lashine advised people seeking to launch their own shop to have a strong plan, and that their previous roles can make a big difference. Lashine started her career as an investment banker, but she advised young people just entering commercial real estate to start in acquisitions or as a developer, because those roles tend to make transition to other things easier. “That’s the seed of most firms that fuel our business,” she said.

The value of building relationships was a key theme of the discussion, and Lashine talked about using her intuition to recognize connections that were worth keeping close. “One day I realized there were people I’d meet, and some spidey sense in me [would say] ‘stay close to them,’” she said. Many of those people now sit on her company’s advisory board, and she counts them among her friends. “It’s about listening to your intuition about who can be helpful to you and who you can learn from,” Lashine said. The panelists also touched on the loneliness that can come with being an entrepreneur, and the importance of having the right kind of advisors at the right time, and of being open to the unexpected. In the early days of her company, a lawyer offered to do all the legal work for her firm for free, because he wanted to see a female leader rise. “You never know where help is going to come from,” Lashine said.