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HKS hires former Eastern principal to launch new i-sales division
Firm is also rebranding as HKS Real Estate Advisors
UPDATED, Sept. 27, 2018, 10:45 a.m.: HKS Capital Partners is joining the onslaught of companies that are launching investment sales divisions.
The capital advisory firm has hired former Eastern Consolidated principal Peter Carillo to build its new business line.
The firm — which was founded by Jerry Swartz, Ayush Kapahi, and John Harrington in 2011— is rebranding as HKS Real Estate Advisors to reflect its expansion into investment sales.
“Ayush and I talked for years about working together – merging his depth of experience in the commercial finance market and mine in the investment sales arena,” Carillo said in a statement.
Carillo started at Eastern Consolidated in 2002 and closed two of the company’s largest transactions during his time there. These included the $225 million sale of a 48-building portfolio in East Harlem with 1,141 apartments and 58 retail units from the Kessner family to the United Kingdom-based institutional investor Dawnay Day and a 15-building, 1434-unit portfolio in Brooklyn and Staten Island that Coney Realty Group and Malek Management purchased from Urban American Management.
Eastern Consolidated announced in June that it was shutting down, putting its roughly 100 brokers on the market. Since then, multiple brokerages have announced that they will launch investment sales divisions.
Lee & Associates NYC launched an investment sales division this summer and just hired Ben Tapper of Eastern Consolidated for the team. Additionally, mortgage brokerage Cooper-Horowitz tapped former Winick Realty Group directors Elana Tsyganko and Max Kostikov to launch its investment sales platform earlier in September, and Compass just launched a commercial division in August.
“A lot of them are being spawned, obviously, by Eastern closing its doors,” said Joel Herskowitz, COO of Lee & Associates. “That’s probably the common denominator with a lot of them. Not with ours but with a lot of them.”
Tim King, a managing partner at CPEX Real Estate, said the recent bout of brokerages launching investment sales divisions was due to an effort to develop multiple revenue streams.
“People are looking to diversify, and it’s not like a doughnut shop starting to sell hamburgers tomorrow,” he said. “There’s a lot of synergy — or people think there is — between debt and sales.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that Benn Tapper was hired to work on Lee & Associate’s i-sales team, not to oversee it.