Mike Courson joined Newmark in 2012 as an Executive Managing Director specializing in the representation of landlords, tenants and investors throughout the Greater Silicon Valley. As of February 2018, Courson was promoted to Vice Chairman. Prior to joining the Palo Alto office, Courson spent 10 years at Cushman & Wakefield (formerly Cassidy Turley), where he achieved partner status within his first four years in the business. Throughout his commercial real estate career, his transactions have exceeded $3.75 billion in value, and since 2003 he has closed over 12.75 million square feet in lease and sale transactions.
Courson has participated in numerous sales and leasing transactions that were later nominated by local business journals as deals of the year. Three standouts are Stanford’s acquisition of the Mid-Point Technology Campus located in Redwood City, totaling 898,278 square feet, ING Clarion’s acquisition of 133,036 square feet along Sand Hill Road and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) build-to-suit, 225,000-rentable-square-foot headquarters located in downtown Redwood City. Throughout Courson’s career, special attention has been paid to downtown amenity and transit orientated markets; specifically, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City. In 2017, Courson led four major Class A ground-up lease transactions in downtown Redwood City totaling over 315,000 rentable square feet. Associated tenants included CZI, Go Fund Me, McKinsey & Company, Bessemer Ventures, Gunderson Dettmer, SendGrid and Highfive.
Partial List of Landlord Clients
- Clarion Partners
- Columbia Property Trust
- Divco
- Invesco
- Hudson Pacific Properties
- Premia
- Presidio Bay Ventures
- Rockwood Capital
- Sobrato Organization
- Windy Hill Ventures
Partial List of Lease Transactions
- NETGEAR, San Jose headquarters and portfolio, 400,000 SF
- Palantir Technologies, downtown Palo Alto, 250,000 SF
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative portfolio, downtown Redwood City, 350,000 SF
- Top Tier Venture Capital / Professional Service, Palo Alto and Sand Hill Road, 200,000+ SF
- Nuance Communications, Mountain View/Sunnyvale, 140,000 SF
- Wildfire, portfolio (acquired by Google), 100,000 SF
- Arlo, North San Jose headquarters and portfolio, 100,000 SF
- Pebble Technology (acquired by Fitbit), downtown Redwood City, 55,000 SF
- Flipboard portfolio, downtown Palo Alto & Redwood City, 50,000 S
Partial List of Sale Transactions
- LeEco, Santa Clara, CA, 50 Acres
- Stanford University, Redwood City, CA, 716,307 SF
- Sobrato Organization, Menlo Park, CA, 194,000 SF
- Hudson Pacific, Palo Alto, CA, 180,000 SF
- ING Clarion, Menlo Park, CA, 133,026 SF
- ING Clarion, Sunnyvale, CA, 105,000 SF
- Archon, Menlo Park, CA, 58,963 SF
Education
Courson graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara.