CBRE duo scores REBNY Ingenious award win for NHL megadeal

A team of CBRE brokers skated to victory Tuesday night, winning the Real Estate Board of New York’s Ingenious Deal of the Year award for securing not only a large office spread for the National Hockey League but also a store and ice rink.

Brokers Michael Laginestra and Michael Geoghegan beat out 14 other teams in the fields of investment sales, leasing and financing for the Henry Hart Rice Award, REBNY’s top deal-making prize.

The deal was essentially three-in-one, or a “hat trick” in hockey terms. In December, the NHL signed for a 160,000-square-foot office, 15,000 square feet of retail and a branded skating rink at Brookfield Property Partners’ 1 Manhattan West, the 2.1 million-square-foot office now under construction on the Far West Side.

Savills Studley’s [TRDataCustom] Woody Heller, who hosted the 73rd annual cocktail party at 101 Park Avenue, noted how unusual it was for a prospective new tenant with eight years left on its lease elsewhere and a “punch list of frustrations” to find sympathy in a landlord, which happened to be one of New York’s largest.

As part of the deal, Brookfield agreed to convert a two-acre plaza site into a hockey rink and take over NHL’s remaining lease obligation.

“I can’t name one hockey player,” Laginestra joked. “Not one.”

Heller, who co-chairs REBNY’s sales brokers committee with Ackman-Ziff Real Estate’s David Robinov, announced the night’s other two winning teams.

The second-place Robert T. Lawrence Award went to David Carlos and Ira Schuman of Savills Studley for brokering two pieces of the Jewish Theological Seminary campus in two complex deals totaling $133 million.

Kathleen McSharry and Scott Singer of Singer & Bassuk Organization took home the third-place Edward S. Gordon Award for negotiating a complex refinancing of $60 million EB-5 debt at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The existing EB-5 investors had lent against the entire 300-acre yard, which sits on one tax lot the city leases to the Economic Development Corporation.

The NHL deal was not the only one in the Hudson Yards area to be nominated. Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s Paul Ippolito had received a nod for handling Intercept Pharmaceutical’s 85,000-square-foot lease at 55 Hudson Yards.

All photos by Alistair Gardiner for The Real Deal