Benjamin Conwell
Senior Managing Director, Cushman & Wakefield
Ben is Senior Managing Director and Practice Leader for Cushman & Wakefield’s eCommerce and Electronic Fulfillment Specialty Practice Group for the Americas. His responsibilities include counsel on strategy, site selection, design and execution for leading retail and logistics occupiers and investors, intellectual property presentation and business development. As leader of the Special Practice Group, Ben provides Cushman & Wakefield clients the most up to date market-leading counsel to effectively plan and execute their supply chain and fulfillment and real estate strategies. He is also a member of the C&W Industrial and Logistics Services Leadership Team and its Executive Committee.
Ben speaks and writes extensively on eCommerce, last mile and associated impacts on retailing, fulfillment, real estate development and investment. Venues include national conferences for NAIOP and Urban Land Institute as well as an extensive list of retailer, investor, university, Wall Street, executive and capital markets events throughout North America.
Prior to joining Cushman & Wakefield in 2015, Ben was Director of North America Logistics Real Estate for Amazon Fulfillment Services, the logistics and operations subsidiary of Amazon.com. His wealth of experience from the occupier perspective comes from having led the largest and fastest expansion of network capacity in Amazon’s history, doubling the size of the logistics footprint. Ben has been at the forefront of locating and building leading-edge electronic fulfillment and eCommerce facilities throughout North America. He managed a fulfillment network of 90 facilities comprising 60 million square feet and led the delivery of almost 30 million square feet of high-tech build-to-suit projects and over five million square feet of repositioned existing buildings. Total project capital investment and expense commitment exceeded $5.0 billion.
Ben also oversaw all real estate functions for site selection, negotiation, buildout and completion for the launch of Amazon Logistics’ sortation centers and last mile infrastructure.
For 24 years prior to joining Amazon, Ben held leadership roles in leasing, development, capital formation, sales and acquisitions and asset management. Asset types managed included industrial, retail, office, residential, master-planned communities, natural resources and golf properties.
Ben holds an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and a Bachelors from the University of Richmond.
Significant community involvement includes NAIOP, Pacific Real Estate Institute, Bellevue Schools Foundation, YMCA of Greater Seattle and Bellevue Young Life. Ben was also selected as a Paul Harris Fellow by Rotary International.
