Former New York Giant turned commercial real estate leasing broker Howard Cross is joining the tenant rep firm Cresa, The Commercial Observer has learned.

Mr. Cross’s hiring follows Mark Jaccom’s, who was named Cresa’s New York area president last week.

Both men were most recently with the brokerage Colliers International.

In a conversation with The Commercial Observer on Tuesday, Mr. Cross said that he was independently considering Cresa when he learned that Mr. Jaccom was heading to the firm.

“The fact that Mark was going to be here was icing on the cake,” Mr. Cross said.

Mr. Cross played tight end for the Giants for 13 seasons, winning a championship with the team in the 1990 season. He said he began working in real estate as an intern during off seasons he said, including at Health South, a company that was involved in buying rehabilitation centers and clinics along the east coast.

In 2002, after he retired from professional football, he joined CBRE where he focused on representing tenants in leaisng transactions. He said he made the switch to Colliers International in 2008 because of the complexity navigating CBRE’s web of in-house relationships, a common complaint among brokers at major real estate firms. At big firms like CBRE, young brokers often are limited in what business they can compete for because higher ranking executives control vast tracts of the company’s business.

“Unfortunately in large firms you have politics and you don’t know who has the relationship with a tenant you meet and want to work with and you don’t want to upset the apple cart so to speak,” Mr. Cross said, adding that moving to Colliers gave him the chance to go after more business.

During Mr. Jaccom’s tenure at Colliers however, his mandate was to grow the firm and Mr. Cross said that as the company, whose New York branch was previously known as GVA Williams, was further integrated in Colliers’ national platform he again began to see the possibility of internal competition.

“It was getting too big again,” Mr. Cross said.

Mr. Cross said he has worked with tenants in several industries including insurance and banking companies. He would appear to be the first of several brokers Cresa would like to recruit in the city. In a conversation with The Commercial Observer last week, Mr. Jaccom said that he is aiming to expand Cresa’s New York staff from about a dozen brokers to 30.

“Mark is going to run an open shop, we’re one giant team,” Mr. Cross said. “Brokers like to keep their cards close to the vest, it’s like the Olympics, we’re on the same team but we all want our own gold medal. Football is the ultimate team sport but brokerage is and Mark is goign to run it more like a football team here.”

Daniel Geiger is reachable at dgeiger

Freshly awarded with a multi-million dollar contract from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, French technology firm Alcatel-Lucent USA has inked a 5-year lease for an office space at The Nelson Tower.

The 5,436-square-foot office at 450 Seventh Avenue, which is owned by The Kaufman Organization, will come complete with offices and a conference room, among other amenities.

Barbara Raskob of the Kaufman Organization represented the landlord in-house.

Gary Ceder of UGL Services Equis Operations Co. represented the Alcatel-Lucent USA. Asking rents are in the low-$40s-a-square-foot.

Average asking rents in the 500,000-square-foot building are $89.21, according to CoStar data.

Last year, Alcatel-Lucent was awarded a 53-month contract, worth over $105 million, by the MTA to upgrade the VHF Radio System in 230 base stations in Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx, according to MTA records.

Both the Subway Radio Systems and eight NYPD sites will receive equipment upgrades. The radio system, which currently runs at 25 KHz narrowband channels, will be reduced (per a mandate by the Federal Communications Commission) to 12.5 KHz narrowband channels.

Alcatel-Lucent will be taking space previously occupied by the Housing Partnership, which moved to 242 West 36th Street, another Kaufman Organization-run building.

With the new MTA contract, Alcatel-Lucent is bringing in 20 new employees, and expects to add 15 in the future, said Ms. Raskob.

“They’re a bunch of bright engineering types-- they’re scary,” said Ms. Raskob.

A lot of Alcatel-Lucent's employees are expected to be out in the field rather than be stuck in the office, which made the building's proximity to Penn Station all the more appealing, she said.

"The nature of their work is design and think-tank, but a lot of it is design," she said.

Daniel Edward Rosen is reachable at drosen@observer.com