Tere Blanca

It took a lot of persuasion to get her there, but now that Tere Blanca de Ulloa is South Florida director for Cushman & Wakefield, she said she’s having the time of her life. Despite the fact that management is unfamiliar territory, Blanca said her long experience as a broker for Codina Group is paying big dividends as she recruits and guides brokers.

“I’m having a lot of fun,” she said. “People define management in different ways. For me, management is providing enthusiasm and cohesiveness in the office. I help people do what they do best.”

Until now, Blanca has always been in the trenches of the battle for sales. After three years as a road warrior with Burroughs Computer Corporation in California, she decided that selling computer supplies wasn’t her niche. Friends suggested she try commercial real estate, and Blanca landed a sales and leasing post with John Burnham & Co. in San Diego.

Blanca met with success and decided she’d be better off pursuing her commercial real estate career back home in South Florida. She moved to Miami and started doing sales and leasing for Coldwell Banker Commercial in 1986.

But all was not well at the firm then, Blanca said. Personnel shifts were frequent, and several top producers left including Hank Kline, who left to join Codina Group. It wasn’t long before he urged Blanca to make the switch.

“He called within a week and said, ‘Hey, you need to meet this man,’” she said, adding that once she interviewed with the firm, “I felt that was going to be home for a while.”

Codina was home for nearly 16 years. In that time, Blanca rose to the level of senior vice president and completed more than $221 million in sales, 2.1 msf in landlord representation and 741,000sf in tenant representation. She was the firm’s top producer several times and was named Codina’s South Florida Broker of the Year for 2002. She represented top corporate clients including Baker & McKenzie, BellSouth, Grant Thornton, Coopers & Lybrand and Equitable Life Assurance Society.

Everything was going fine until last year, when Blanca got a call from a recruiting firm seeking a South Florida director for Cushman & Wakefield. She refused them at first, being unsure about taking the role of a manager. But it wasn’t long before she entertained the idea.

“I really was not looking for a job,” she said. “They were extremely persuasive and got me to the first meeting.”

Cushman & Wakefield’s promise to provide vital personnel support and help with business development gave Blanca the confidence to start the next phase of her career.

“It required a lot of soul searching,” she said. “But they’ve honored every bit of it.” With a roster of 38 brokers and support staff covering the tricounty area, Cushman & Wakefield handles some 40% of the disposition work in South Florida and also is active on the investment side, Blanca said, adding that the multifamily group is expanding exponentially.

“My vision is to expand on what we do best and then add other disciplines,” she said, including an expanded landlord representation business and adding debt capability to the Financial Services Group through a Miami-based office.

Born in Cuba, Blanca moved to Puerto Rico with her parents and grew up in Ponce, the island’s second-largest city. The family then moved to Caracas, Venezuela, where she stayed through high school. She came to the United States in 1978 to attend the University of Miami, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1981. She earned her MBA in 1983.

Blanca is a board member of the Corpus Christi School for underprivileged children and the Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade County. She is a member of the Beacon Council, Miami-Dade’s economic development agency. She was recently interviewed for Personal Selling, a Houghton Mifflin college text by Professor Rolph Anderson of Drexel University and Professor Alan Dubinsky of Purdue University.

Blanca has two daughters ages 11 and 8.