Houlihan Lawrence starts commercial division

Westchester-based residential brokerage Houlihan Lawrence last month launched a new commercial division.

The new division will do office and industrial leasing, investment sales, retail leasing and sales and some consulting work. Thomas LaPerch and Steven Salomone, both formerly of the Hudson Valley–based brokerage Prudential Serls, have been tapped to head the operation. LaPerch will serve as director of the commercial group, and Salomone as director of real estate investment sales.

Stephen Meyers, CEO of Houlihan Lawrence, said the new division is a logical extension of Houlihan’s current business, especially given the recovery of the commercial sector in Westchester and surrounding counties.  “We have over 1,000 agents, and they often discover that their residential customers also have commercial interests,” he said.

Currently, the new division has five brokers in Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess counties and plans to grow that to seven to 10 brokers in the next year or so. The division is based in Houlihan Lawrence’s headquarters in Rye Brook. “It makes sense for Houlihan to exploit the network they have developed, because they are interfacing with lots of people who could potentially be large investors,” said LaPerch, who was previously director of real estate development projects at Prudential Serls.

Salomone most recently worked as a director of the Prudential Serls Commercial Group in Dutchess County. “We took [Prudential Serls’ commercial] from being an ad hoc division to being pretty much the premier group in Dutchess County,” Salomone said, adding that the pair expects to re-create that success at Houlihan.

The group’s listings include an office building in Ardsley asking $600,000 and a development parcel in Wappingers Falls priced at $1.5 million.