Eastdil picks up acquisitions pro from SL Green

Eastdil Secured has tapped an SL Green Realty acquisitions pro to join its sales team.

Drew Isaacson, a senior vice president at SL Green, will head to the real estate investment banking firm next week as a senior vice president in the New York City office, sources told The Real Deal.

Isaacson has spent the past seven years at the REIT, where he’s worked on deals like last year’s $447 million sale of the Olivia apartment building on West 33rd Street to a fund backed by Brookfield Asset Management.

Isaacson is also heavily involved in the company’s debt and preferred-equity book. Prior to SL Green, he spent about five years at Waterman Interests, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A representative for Eastdil Secured declined to comment, and Isaacson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Isaacson will work on the sales team led by Gary Phillips and Will Silverman.

The hire comes as Eastdil, once New York City’s top investment sales brokerage, looks to regain some of the ground lost to competitors in recent years. Its top sales team, led by Doug Harmon and Adam Spies, left for rival Cushman & Wakefield in 2016.

Eastdil ranked as the fourth most-active brokerage in New York City in 2019 with $1.8 billion worth of deals, according to the most recent ranking by The Real Deal. That put it behind competitors Cushman, CBRE and JLL — firms the company had previously dominated.

Eastdil has also suffered something of a brain drain in recent years as a number of its home-grown brokers left. Most recently, senior vice president Bruer Kershner departed in October after more than eight years at the firm. He took a job at CBRE in Philadelphia, according to his LinkedIn.

Headed by CEO Roy March, Eastdil has long prided itself on its company culture — “the Eastdil way” — built on a model where brokers work collaboratively on deals in a salary-and-bonus compensation structure, as opposed to the “eat what you kill” commission basis of most commercial real estate brokers. Eastdil was also known for training and bringing up professionals through its ranks, but in recent years the company has relied more heavily on outside hires.

But it’s been in the midst of some major changes. March oversaw a management-led buyout of the company in late 2019, financed by the asset management firm Guggenheim Investments and the Singapore sovereign-wealth fund Temasek Holdings.

And Eastdil recently lost its founder and longtime chairman Ben Lambert, who died in early February at the age of 82.