Former Massey Knakal broker launches new sales firm in Queens


Broker Swain Weiner
Broker Swain Weiner, who worked for nine years in the Queens office of investment sales firm Massey Knakal Realty Services, left the company last month to launch a new brokerage in partnership with the nearly 60-year-old industrial sales firm Greiner-Maltz Real Estate.

Weiner resigned from Massey Knakal April 16 to start Greiner-Maltz Investment Properties as president and a partner. In contrast to Greiner-Maltz Real Estate, which specializes in selling industrial properties to users, the new company will focus on marketing retail, multifamily and mixed-use buildings to investors.

“We are focusing on those three categories,” Weiner said. To do that, his firm will leverage market information from Greiner-Maltz Real Estate. “The idea,” he said, “is we try to accomplish synergies.”

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The new firm will focus on Queens, but will do sales throughout the city and Long Island, Weiner said.

He’s entering a market with steep competition. In 2009, former Greiner-Maltz brokers formed Queens-based Pinnacle Realty of New York. And more than a half dozen other new firms have entered New York City’s investment sales market as spin-offs since 2008. Ariel Property Advisors, CPEX Real Estate and Terra CRG, for example, were all launched by former Massey Knakal brokers.

Weiner, who has completed about $170 million in sales since joining Massey Knakal in 2003, is the only broker at the new company. But he said he plans to hire several additional brokers for the firm, which is located in the same Queens offices as Greiner-Maltz Real Estate.