Andrew Farkas’ commercial brokerage slashes NYC presence

Andrew Farkas
Andrew Farkas

Billionaire investor Andrew Farkas’ latest venture, NAI Global, which controls more than 200 commercial brokerages around the world, is reducing its New York City presence and will sublet its office space at 415 Madison Avenue.

NAI recently reduced the brokers it employs in Manhattan to four, from 12.

CBRE Group has been hired to Sublet The Madison Avenue space, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Charles Piazza, an executive with NAI’s New York office, confirmed the downsizing to the Journal, but declined to comment further.

Farkas — who built Insignia Financial Group into one of the largest real estate brokerages in the country in the 1990s before CBRE bought it for $415 million, in 2003 — has once again become an active player in the market in the last few years. He snapped up special loan servicers such as Centerline Holding Corp. and JER Partners, as The Real Deal reported, and looked at buying now-defunct Grubb & Ellis in 2011. [WSJ]Hiten Samtani