Google/Alphabet controls tens of millions of square feet of large and highly specialized urban office campuses, hyperscale data centers, and future development sites, from the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to Google’s urban office portfolio in New York City. Michael Tabb WG99, Google’s director of real estate services for the Americas, shares how the company’s community-centric approach is transforming cities and the importance of mentoring others when building a career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kent Trabing: What is your role as the real estate director for such a creative and impactful company?
Michael Tabb: I am fortunate to have a very diverse background. At Google, I can sit in most meetings and be familiar and comfortable no matter what direction we’re going. I’ve done retail real estate, office, industrial, and residential. I’ve supported public finance deals and privately financed deals. Ultimately, my job is to manage complex requirements with some of the most talented and hardworking professionals in the CRE industry. My role is problem-solving and resource management. I coach and direct and also try to mentor.
KT: How do you think about the return on investment of your projects?
Michael Tabb WG99
MT: Google is a little unique. It is not necessarily about a traditional return on investment. The guidelines with which we approach transactions, requirements, and opportunities really depend on what we’re trying to achieve. In some cases, for example, we might want to help a certain business group operate better, put them in a better location, improve their quality of life or employee satisfaction. It’s never purely financial. So we might put a division in a location because it’s the right place with the right amenity package, and everyone is thrilled and happy.
KT: You must have many stakeholders — each with their own skill sets for acquisition, financing, and construction — to bring a real estate project to fruition. How do you coordinate that?
MT: Google creates a very cooperative environment. Take the concept of team. It’s not an individual’s team; it’s the team that’s engaged in whatever we’re doing. Although my direct team might be leading the transaction side of a project, we work closely with the construction, planning, facilities and property management, business support. We coordinate by first aligning as the broadest group on what we’re all trying to accomplish, and then begins a lot of communication and challenging each other. Everyone does their best to stay in their own business lane and be respectful of other people’s requirements. When we do that, we get great results. Everybody figures out how to row in the same direction. Things become efficient and effective.
KT: A lot of real estate projects face challenging, often unexpected site conditions. Could you tell a story about an environment that significantly impacted a project and how you adapted to it?
MT: Ultimately, all projects require us to be adaptable and creative. One recent example was Google’s Midwest headquarters, located in Fulton Market, the hottest neighborhood in Chicago. Google helped to pioneer Fulton Market with a number of great developers. Our contribution was to bring our tenancy there and energize the market with our occupancy and sense of community. The area exploded, and we found ourselves literally having to renew and expand based upon the highest rents in the city — rents that we were responsible for creating. The questions then became: Do we buy our own building? Do we need to be in the most expensive market in Chicago? Is that Google’s image? Can we use our strength as a catalytic user to revitalize an area again? We translated that vision into a search that brought us to the Thompson Center, a landmark project in Chicago’s Central Loop. It’s a beautiful, iconic treasure with great community value and redevelopment upside.
Rendering of Google’s Thompson Center project, scheduled to open in 2027.
KT: You’re an advisory board member for Penn’s Institute for Urban Research. Can you share more about that role?
MT: It’s a phenomenal group of professionals. I’m not an academic, and I’m based in Atlanta, but I have a unique perspective in the corporate and urban redevelopment space. A lot of my focus is around supporting urban underserved communities. I am probably the person on the board who chimes in a little bit more to say, “Let’s broaden that perspective and hit some of these other areas of interest and concern.”
KT: What would you see as a cutting-edge project that you’re pursuing in the Americas, from Chile to Canada?
MT: One of the most innovative things that my team does well is to help the company create what we call triple wins: good for us, good for the community, good for the landlord or owner. We really do try to hit all of these, and we have done it repeatedly in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, and New York.
The Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles was one of the team’s most enjoyable and impactful projects. I approached UCLA and offered them a chance to take over surplus Google space. The company had many disposal options but ultimately elected to support helping UCLA realize its goal for an expanded West Los Angeles campus. As a result, UCLA now owns a fabulous tech expansion, the community benefited from another important catalytic redevelopment, and Google reinforced its commitment to the community and to supporting higher education. None of this would have been possible without Google’s help.
Kent Trabing WG01 is the founder of the Wharton Club of New York Magazine and served as its editor from 2010 to 2022. He interviewed alumni in varying industries, from finance to startups to technology. His own career is in real estate, managing and selling corporate properties.
