• Howard Lutnick opened his wallet and Rolodex to turn Newmark into a commercial real estate success.
• Lutnick now plans to head to Washington to take a position as President Trump's commerce secretary.
• "I'll miss Howard," Newmark CEO Barry Gosin tells Business Insider. "But the day-to-day business runs."

Howard Lutnick, chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to be commerce secretary, has had a winning streak that extends beyond Wall Street and his investment banking firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.

In 2011, the billionaire arranged for his affiliate financial company, BGC Group, to purchase the New York-based commercial real estate services firm Newmark for an undisclosed sum.

In the ensuing years, BGC pumped in capital to buy up talent and acquire smaller rivals, brought Newmark public in 2017, and played a role in its management, with BGC executives taking posts at the firm and Lutnick chairing its board of directors.

The results have turned heads in the ultra-competitive real estate business.

The company, once focused on New York City's office market, is now mentioned alongside global powerhouse rivals like JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, and CBRE.

"Howard helped Barry transform transform Newmark from a regional player to now a global one," said Alexander Goldfarb, an analyst at Piper Sandler who covers Newmark, referencing Barry Gosin, Newmark's CEO.

"It's one of the best positioned real estate players today," Goldfarb added, noting that he has an "overweight" – or buy – rating on Newmark stock.

Now, Lutnick's move to Washington would leave Newmark – along with Cantor and BGC – without one of the architects of its success.

Lutnick has said he will divest his shares in Newmark and BGC, which is also public, and step from his leadership roles at the companies and also Cantor, which is privately owned.

Newmark executives say the firm has the talent and momentum to continue its path without Lutnick in the boardroom.

"I'll miss Howard," Gosin, who is 74, said. "But the day-to-day business runs."

Nonetheless, Lutnick has played a direct hand in the company's rise, observers said, using his Rolodex in corporate America, for instance, to help its executives open doors and win business.

"A lot of big tenant representation assignments, a lot of capital markets stuff came out of BGC and Howard's relationships," a former New York broker at the company told Business Insider. The person did not want to be identified because their past employment agreement with Newmark prevented them from speaking publicly about the company or its executives.

From $60 million to $3.8 billion

Newmark's performance has added to the lore of Lutnick's 40-year career, during which he built BGC and Cantor, where he is also CEO, into major players in the financial industry.

Before the BGC acquisition, Newmark was owned by a handful of the firm's top producing brokers, CEO Gosin, and the Gurals, a New York real estate family that owns a large portfolio of office properties.

BGC paid a little more than $60 million in cash and stock, according to reports at the time – a fraction of its roughly $3.8 billion market capitalization now.

Lutnick "saw a great opportunity to apply scale and professional management to a business and capitalize on a very fragmented industry," said Mark Weiss, a former Newmark broker who left the company in 2016 to head to rival Cushman & Wakefield. "And he did just that."

Lutnick's involvement bankrolled the business. The famously charming executive could also soften Gosin's bluntness.

Scott Panzer, a prominent commercial real estate leasing broker who left Newmark two years before BGC's acquisition for competitor JLL, bumped into Gosin and Lutnick together at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in around 2012.

"Oh my god you're here?" Panzer remembers Gosin telling him. "I think I'm going to have to rethink my membership to this."

"Howard and I both looked at one another, and we both started laughing," Panzer recalled.

Panzer said he is now cordial with Gosin and that he admires the transformation of Newmark that he and Lutnick were able to accomplish.

Gosin would not comment on the incident.

Not everyone is a fan of Howard Lutnick

Early in his tenure at Newmark, Lutnick drew ire from some dealmakers at the company for rejiggering its employment contracts. The new terms required brokers to accept about 10% of their commissions on deals in Newmark stock that would vest over time.

In 2014, Newmark purchased Grubb & Ellis, a commercial real estate services firm, out of bankruptcy. Some brokers from Grubb chose to leave in the merger. One former Grubb broker said that the employment contract he was offered contained onerous provisions, such as a sweeping non-compete restriction should he eventually leave the new company.

"You wouldn't even be able to drive a taxi cab," he said.

While the changes that Lutnick initiated may have ruffled some brokers, they eventually proved prescient, helping to retain talent and yielding profits for those who remained at the firm as Newmark's stock rose.

"Howard was helpful in setting up the business, in giving me the backbone and the foundational knowledge of how to do it differently — how to innovate, how to create a partnership, how to build a business for the long term," Gosin said.

More recently, Lutnick attracted shareholder outrage when he was awarded an enormous $50 million bonus from Newmark in 2021.

"There are some people who will not invest in Newmark because of that," Piper analyst Goldfarb said.

That anger has faded as Lutnick's vision of an ascendant Newmark has come to fruition.

"We are well in the conversation," Gosin said, referring to Newmark's increasing competitiveness in the top tier of the commercial real estate services and brokerage businesses.

David Falk, the president of Newmark's New York region and a leading leasing broker at the company, agreed. He said that Lutnick and Gosin had effectively built up other service lines at the company in ways that impressed clients and helped Falk – and other brokers at the firm – win assignments. The company's deep bench of talent, he said, is a far cry from the past when Newmark lagged major competitors in ancillary areas such as financing, property management, and investment sales.

"I hated the fact that 15 years ago, I would go to a meeting and I was maybe bringing someone I thought could handle an assignment, but I didn't feel great about it," Falk said. "Now we have stars everywhere."

• Donald Trump has tapped Wall Street CEO Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.
• Lutnick has spent over three decades running Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank in New York.
• See his career highlights and who could take over at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, has been named the next US secretary of commerce for Donald Trump.

As the head of the Commerce Department, Lutnick would have sway over the economy through tariffs and trade. If confirmed by the Senate, he would be integral to Trump's plan to raise tariffs on goods from China, a central promise of the president-elect's bid for a second White House term.

The Wall Street veteran has spent his career at financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he has been president and CEO since 1991. In recent years, the billionaire banker has become a key advisor to and fundraiser for the 47th president. He is cochair of the Trump transition team.

Here's a look at Lutnick's rise from "middle-class Long Island" to Wall Street boss and what his new role could mean for the investment bank he heads.

Who is Howard Lutnick?

Lutnick was named president and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald in 1991 — at age 29 — and, by 1996, had been appointed chairman.

In an interview on a podcast hosted by the investor Anthony Pompliano, he said that he had a "classic middle-class Long Island" childhood, with his mother working as an art teacher and his father as a history professor. His mother passed away from breast cancer when Lutnick was in the 11th grade, and his father died from cancer shortly after he started college.

He was 18 and found himself caring for his younger brother, who was 15 at the time. He also had a 20-year-old sister. He recalled being unable to cook for his siblings, so they ate boxed macaroni and cheese night after night, he shared on the podcast.

Lutnick said in the podcast that he landed his first job at Cantor Fitzgerald with the help of a family connection. He took a semester off of his studies at Haverford College to start working but eventually earned his degree in economics.

What is Cantor Fitzgerald?

Cantor Fitzgerald offers a range of services, from investment banking to sales and trading to equity research.

The firm's website said it has raised more than $45 billion for clients through 700 deals since 2016 and that it has more than 1,150 active institutional and corporate clients. The New York City-based firm counts more than 245 professionals on its sales and trading team and cites its "core expertise" as healthcare and technology.

The firm's asset-management arm had some $13.2 billion in assets as of the end of 2023 with investments in real estate, private markets, infrastructure, equities, and fixed income, to name a few.

Cantor's biggest deals

According to data from the deal-tracking firm Dealogic, three of the largest and most recent transactions Cantor Fitzgerald has advised on include:

• Johnson & Johnson's $1.9 billion acquisition of Ambrx Biopharma, completed in January 2024
• Primavera Capital's $866 million acquisition of Fosun Fashion Group, completed in March 2022
• Inflection Point Acquisition Corp's $850 million acquisition of Intuitive Machines, completed in September 2022

Out of their top 20 deals by transaction size since 2022, the most represented sectors were tech, healthcare, and utilities and energy. Six of those deals were in technology, five in healthcare, three in utilities and energy, two in retail, two in mining, and one each in aerospace and transportation.

Who's next in line to lead the firm?

It's unclear what Cantor Fitzgerald's future looks like without Lutnick. A spokesperson for the firm did not immediately return a request for comment.

Bloomberg reported that Lutnick's top deputies have been in their respective roles for at least six years, including Stephen Merkel, an executive vice chairman and general counsel, who joined in 1993.

Other top executives, according to the firm's website, include Global chief operating officer Mark Kaplan; Global head of investment banking Sage Kelly; Global head of equities Pascal Bandelier; Global head of fixed income Christian Wall, and Chief Financial Officer Danny Salinas.

His relationship with Trump

Lutnick, a longtime supporter of Trump, became a visible member of the ex-president's inner circle in the 2024 election cycle.

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., said: "Howard's not a regular Wall Street guy — he's a real MAGA guy. Have you heard him talk about tariffs? Have you heard him talk about shredding the deep state bureaucracy? He's one of us," Trump Jr. said.

Leading up to the election, he was an active organizer and fundraiser for Trump, including appearing at Trump's rally in Madison Square Garden.

The impact of the 9/11 attacks on Lutnick's life

Cantor Fitzgerald was headquartered at 1 World Trade Center when terrorists flew planes into it and a neighboring lower Manhattan building in 2001. Two-thirds of Cantor's employees, or 658 people, died in the attacks, including Lutnick's brother.

Lutnick was named the Financial Times' Person of the Year after the attacks in 2001.

His new role

As commerce secretary, Lutnick will be in charge of carrying out Trump's aggressive tariff proposals, which have called for taxes in imports of between 10% and 60%. He will also be in charge of the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which reports on gross domestic product.

Leading up to his appointment as commerce secretary, media reports suggested Lutnick was vying for a role as Treasury Secretary.

The New York Times reported this week that the behind-the-scenes jockeying between the two for the role had devolved into a "knife fight," according to a source familiar with their schism.

• Trump has nominated Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.
• It's a pivotal pick given that economic concerns helped fuel Trump's win.
• Lutnick had been viewed as a frontrunner for the position of treasury secretary.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated billionaire finance executive Howard Lutnick as his next commerce secretary.

"He will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative," Trump said in a statement first posted on Truth Social and later released by his transition team.

"Howard has created the most sophisticated process and system to assist us in creating the greatest Administration America has ever seen," Trump said.

Lutnick, who is Trump's transition team cochair alongside the WWE chief Linda McMahon, had been seen as a frontrunner for the treasury secretary position.

Lutnick even garnered the support of Elon Musk for the role. Despite some powerful backing, Lutnick's private jockeying for the role wore on those around Trump, according to multiple reports.

Now, with Lutnick out of the picture, Trump is likely nearing his final decision for his last major Cabinet appointment.

Commerce secretary will be a pivotal role in the Trump administration, given economic concerns played a key role in fueling Trump's victory.

As the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick is a New York financial powerhouse. He's known Trump for decades and has hosted fundraisers for the president-elect and appeared on TV as a surrogate.

He spoke onstage at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, touting the tariffs of yesteryear and Musk's forthcoming DOGE initiative alongside the Tesla billionaire.

Lutnick is known for steering Cantor Fitzgerald through the September 11, 2002, terrorist attacks.

The firm's offices were located at the top of one of the World Trade Center towers, and roughly two-thirds of its workforce was killed that day. It lost more workers on 9/11 than any other company.

Lutnick's brother was killed in the attack, but Lutnick survived because he happened to be taking his son to school that morning.