From left: Galleria’s Mickey Roth, Urban Sanctuary’s Isaac Krispin and 160 Pearl StreetIt may be less than a year old, but Mickey Roth’s residential sales brokerage the Galleria Group is merging with Urban Sanctuary, The Real Deal has learned, to create a larger and more competitive firm, both company heads said.
The merger is a recent idea, said Isaac Krispin, president of Urban Sanctuary, and follows from the two firms working together on some recent resales in Midtown. No money will change hands in the deal, Krispin said, which is slated to be finalized in the next month or so.
Galleria, founded in 2010 by Roth, hot off the heels of his departure from Prudential Douglas Elliman and a short stint at Park River Properties, which he co-founded, now has seven agents and works out of a “small” seven-person office at 115 East 57th Street, Roth said. Urban Sanctuary has around 30 agents and two offices — at 160 Pearl Street and 37 East 28th Street. All of the current agents at both firms will be retained in the merger and Krispin expects to hire around 10 to 20 new agents. [more]

Kevin Ellerton, the CEO of Blackstone Properties, which has snagged a significant market share but also drawn ire from competitors.

From the February issue: At the ripe old age of 24, Kevin Ellerton is managing to become one of
the most powerful players in the Lower Manhattan rental game. To hear
his competitors talk, he’s also one of the most loathed.
Ellerton is the CEO of Blackstone Properties, a company he started
less than two years ago with a high school friend, David Yomtobian.
(Ellerton’s company has no relation to the powerful private equity firm
the Blackstone Group.)
By Ellerton’s calculations, about half of all brokered rental deals
in the Financial District and Battery Park City are inked by Blackstone
agents. While executives at other Lower Manhattan firms say that number
might be closer to 40 percent, they grudgingly concede that Blackstone
has grabbed a formidable share of the rental market in a very short
period of time. [more]

From the October issue: With the combination of high building vacancy rates and the down
market, Roberto Gonzalez, an agent at Bond New York, expected to see a
wave of tenants erecting walls and “cramming” into apartments to save
rent money. But the expected flood of people seeking to pile into shares hasn’t
really arrived, he said. “Everything in my gut tells me there should be
tons of people sharing, but there are actually fewer,” said Gonzalez,
who has rentals in Tribeca, the East Village and Williamsburg. Brokers who deal with areas of Manhattan where there are a high
percentage of shares — such as the Financial District, Murray Hill and
Union Square — said that while landlords may be more apt to allow
tripling and quadrupling up just to get an apartment full, that there
hasn’t been a huge surge. [more]

Elie Pariente said he has seen a number of AIG execs relocating to 15 Broad Street

Brokers who work in the Financial District say they are seeing an increase in the number of financial services executives posted abroad who are relocating back to New York, and specifically to newer developments in the Financial District. Elie Pariente, managing partner at Urban Sanctuary, said he has done four deals in the past 45 days with AIG executives returning to the U.S. from Tokyo and Singapore, to work for Chartis Insurance, an AIG spin-off. Three of the apartments that Pariente, who said he has a history of deals with AIG employees, sold were in 15 Broad Street. All four were two-bedroom apartments, which Pariente called “standard” for financial services executives. The apartments ranged in size from 1,200 to 1,600 square feet and in price from $1.1 million to $1.5 million. [more]

A few months after switching marketing firms from now-defunct JC DeNiro & Associates to Brown Harris Stevens, District’s developers have made another change, this time to Urban Marketing, a new division of brokerage Urban Sanctuary. Switching sales and marketing firms has become a common response from developers to slowing sales amid the recession. District, a 163-unit condominium at 111 Fulton Street, is currently over 70 percent sold out, said Stephen McArdle, a partner at Urban Marketing. [more]

From the July issue: The jury’s still out on the sales market, but Manhattan’s notoriously
hectic summer rental season is carrying on at its usual pace —
financial crisis or not. Prices may be lower and incentives more
plentiful, but summer is still the busiest time of year for rentals,
and that hasn’t changed, brokers say. Some brokers are even reporting
that they are doing more business this year than last year, spurred by
the low rents and broker’s fees being paid by landlords. “From January
to May, every single month was better than the previous year’s for
rentals,” said Issac Krispin, the president of Urban Sanctuary, a
brokerage with two Manhattan offices. [more]