Citi Habitats has acquired Miron Properties, a 100-agent firm founded by Jeff Schleider in 2009. The deal, which comes just six months after Citi Habitats bought David Maundrell’s Aptsandlofts.com, is another sign that the firm sees Brooklyn as the next frontier.
Citi Habitats, which is a division of the Corcoran Group will take over two of the company’s four offices, at 982 Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint and 1055 Bedford Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Schleider will now serve as the brokerage’s senior vice president of business development and is charged with expanding the combined firm’s Brooklyn operations. Miron’s two Manhattan storefronts, at 84 and 90 East 10th Street near Union Square, will close. All agents from the Manhattan offices will be relocated to Citi Habitats offices.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We’re now far stronger than we were only 24 hours ago,” Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats, told The Real Deal. “We’ve become a dynamic organization in my eyes by looking for key companies that we could work with.”
These recent acquisitions represent a turning of the tide for Citi, which was downsizing as recently as 2013, in the wake of its parent company Realogy’s much-hyped IPO. At its peak size, it had a total 17 offices — it now done to nine and has made Brooklyn a big priority, with four locations there.
Its acquisition of Aptsandlofts.com last October was also designed to give the rental giant a long-sought foothold across the river, where Aptsandlofts.com had developed a deep roster of clients. Maundrell took the role of executive vice president at Citi Habitats, leading the company’s new development marketing efforts in Brooklyn and Queens.
“I’ve spent the last 3.5 or four years reimagining what Citi Habitats is and how it operates,” Malin said. “We really put ourselves in a different position to grow and the area where we have significant opportunity to grow is Brooklyn. We were doing a tremendous amount of business in Brooklyn but didn’t have a physical presence.”
The deal, which had been in the works since December, was instigated by Schleider, who contacted Realogy about a potential sale last year.
“As the industry consolidated, in order to provide resources we wanted to provide, it made sense to join larger firm,” he said.
With this most recent acquisition, Citi now has approximately 900 agents.
Realogy has been on a bit of an acquisition binge in New York over the past few months. Another of its properties, Sotheby’s International Realty, recently acquired luxury brokerage Fenwick Keats for an undisclosed sum. The deal boosted Sotheby’s New York City ranks by 77 agents and represent an infusion of ultra-luxury listings for the firm.