Angie Leccese Is Selling the Story Behind the Square Footage

There is a quiet assumption in commercial real estate that the numbers do the talking. Cap rates, price per square foot, net effective rent - lay them on the table and the biggest number wins. Angie Leccese has spent close to three decades proving that the assumption is only half right. The numbers get you into the room. What happens after that is a story, and someone has to tell it well.

Since October 2022, Leccese has been the Chief Marketing Officer of Newmark, the New York-based advisory firm that brokers leases, arranges financing, values portfolios and manages property for clients around the world. It is a company of roughly 8,800 people and billions of dollars in annual revenue, and her job is to make all of that add up to something a client can feel, remember, and repeat to their own boss.

She did not arrive there by accident, and she did not arrive there fast. She got there the slow way - by staying.

A career built on staying put

Most marketing careers are a tour of industries. Software one year, consumer goods the next, a fintech startup after that. Leccese did the opposite. She picked commercial real estate early and went deep instead of wide, and the depth turned out to be the whole advantage.

She started as a marketing specialist at Colliers in the late 1990s, back when a "content strategy" was a brochure and a fax machine. From there she moved to Cousins Properties, the Atlanta developer, where she spent more than a decade climbing from marketing director to a role most marketers never touch in real estate: vice president of retail brand management. Marketing a shopping center to actual shoppers is a different muscle than marketing a tower to a broker, and she built both.

By 2010 she was senior vice president of marketing at Cousins. Two years later she joined CBRE, the largest name in the business, as a senior marketing director covering the Southeast. She was promoted into business development in 2016 and eventually became vice president of business development for Americas advisory marketing - the part of the job where marketing stops being decoration and starts being the thing that wins the deal.

The retail brand years are easy to skip past, but they shaped everything that came after. Selling a mall means thinking about a person pushing a stroller on a Saturday - what makes them come, what makes them stay, what makes them come back. Very few people who market office towers ever have to think that way. When Leccese later stood in front of a room full of brokers, she brought a habit most of them had never built: starting with the human on the other end, not the asset on the page.

The climb, in one glance

What a real estate CMO actually does

The title sounds glamorous. The work is closer to plumbing. Leccese oversees the planning, development and execution of Newmark's marketing and business development strategy, with a stated focus on two unglamorous words: content marketing and sales enablement. Translated, that means giving thousands of brokers and advisors the material, the data and the narrative they need to win business - and making sure the firm sounds like one company instead of 8,800 freelancers.

It is a harder sell inside the building than out. Salespeople who live and die by their own deals do not automatically trust a marketing department, and real estate has historically treated marketing as an afterthought - the people who make the sign nice. Leccese's whole career has been an argument against that, made patiently, one campaign at a time.

Notice the last three words of that quote: support the core business. That is the language of a marketer who has sat next to salespeople for 25 years. She does not describe marketing as the show. She describes it as the thing that helps the show sell tickets.

There is also a structural clue in how the role was set up. At Newmark she reports to the chief administrative officer rather than sitting off in a standalone marketing silo, and she is charged with tying brand to business development rather than treating the two as separate departments. That is a bet on integration - on marketing living close to where the revenue is made. It happens to match exactly the shape of the career she spent building, one that runs straight through brand, retail, and the deal-winning end of business development without ever picking just one.

Marketing the unmarketable

Consider the annual report. It is the most ignored document in corporate life - a legal obligation wrapped in a PDF, read by almost no one on purpose. Under Leccese, a Newmark annual report was recognized as "Annual Report of the Year" at the Best in Biz Awards. Making people want to read the annual report is roughly the marketing equivalent of getting applause for a tax form.

That is the recurring pattern in her work: take the part of the business everyone skips - the report, the market data, the pitch deck - and make it the part they remember. Commercial real estate is one of the oldest industries on earth. Land, buildings, leases. Nothing new under the sun. The trick is not inventing something new. It is making the old thing feel like it is moving forward.

Beyond the brand book

Since 2023 she has served on Newmark's ESG Executive Committee, where marketing meets a genuinely hard problem: how to talk about sustainability and governance without sliding into slogans nobody believes. Away from the office she has volunteered with Table on Delk, a group focused on human trafficking prevention, and with Heart for Africa. In 2024 the industry publication GlobeSt named her one of its Women of Influence, the CRE sector's nod to the people shaping where it goes next.

The case for going deep

If there is a lesson buried in the resume, it is about depth. Leccese did not chase whatever was fashionable. She stayed in one industry long enough to know it cold, and when Newmark needed a chief marketer, they did not have to teach her the business - she already spoke the language of brokers, landlords and capital markets fluently. In a job market obsessed with reinvention, her career is a quiet argument for the opposite: pick something, stay, and let the compounding do its work.

Geography reinforced it. She is a University of Georgia graduate who built the bulk of her career out of Atlanta, a city that grew into a genuine corporate hub while she was learning her trade there. Staying in one market for years does the same thing staying in one industry does - it turns a stranger into someone who knows which relationships matter and why. When the New York job came, she brought a Southeast network and a Southeast sensibility with her, and neither had to be rebuilt from scratch.

The other quiet advantage of a long runway is that you accumulate range without ever advertising it. Colliers taught her the fundamentals in an analog era. Cousins handed her a developer's view of how buildings actually get made and filled. CBRE dropped her into the largest platform in the industry, where scale is its own discipline. By the time she reached Newmark, she had seen the business from the specialist's desk, the developer's boardroom, and the global brokerage's engine room. Few marketers get all three angles. Fewer still get them in a single field.

The numbers below sketch how uneven that time was spent - not evenly across employers, but weighted toward the two places where she built the deepest roots before the top job came calling.

Approximate tenure by firm, based on public career records. Newmark ongoing.

From a marketing specialist role in Athens, Georgia to a corner of the C-suite at 125 Park Avenue, the through-line never changed. A tenant does not sign a 12-year lease because of a floor plan. A landlord does not pick an advisor because of a fee schedule. They choose the team that made them feel understood - and behind that feeling, more often than the numbers let on, is a marketer who knew the story was the product all along.

Angie Leccese has spent a career proving the point. The square footage gets the meeting. The story gets the signature.