Commercial brokerage firm Eastern Consolidated will shut down permanently next month, the company’s founders said Friday.
Peter Hauspurg and Daun Paris, the married couple who founded Eastern Consolidated in 1981, had worked with the investment bank Kimberlite to find a buyer, but could not find a deal with favorable terms, the Commercial Observer reported. They didn’t say who offered to buy the firm, however.
“We went to the logical suspects,” Hauspurg said.
The shutdown comes amid a turbulent time for the brokerage business in New York. RKF recently sold to the now publicly-traded Newmark Group and Town Residential announced it was closing for good in April.
Despite the announced closing, Eastern Consolidated was still a top 10 investment sales shop in New York as of last year. In 2017, the firm closed 47 commercial sales with a total dollar volume of $622.4 million, though that was down 60 percent from 2016. The firm was recently surpassed by competitors like Meridian Capital, and in 2015 the firm lost top agents like David Schechtman, Lipa Lieberman and Abie Kassin to Merdian. Hauspurg told the CO the sliding investment sales market had “no clear indication of when conditions will improve.”
Over the next month, Hauspurg and Paris say they will keep the company open to give staff members time to find new job and will provide severance packages to the 40 members of its 140-member staff who are salaried employees (the brokers work on commission). [CO] — Will Parker