Bellmarc sheds corporate HQ
Aiming to cut costs, Bellmarc Realty has closed its corporate headquarters at 352 Park Avenue South between 25th and 26th streets, according to Neil Binder, the company’s co-founder.
Binder and other corporate personnel have moved from the Park Avenue South office into a branch office at 936 Broadway at 22nd Street, Binder said. The lease on the Park Avenue South space had ended, he said, and the company decided to give it up in order to save money on overhead costs. There was also extra space at the company’s Broadway office, he said.
In the current climate, “it’s prudent to think about what you can do to preserve your financial integrity,” Binder said.
The offices of Bellmarc Property Management, the building management branch of the business, also moved from Park Avenue South to Broadway, said Jo-Anne Sinnott, the company’s director of corporate communications.
In addition to the Broadway office, the company has offices on the East and West sides, Midtown and Downtown. All four are still open, Sinnott said.
While times have been tough, Binder said he’s optimistic about the future.
Since the beginning of the year, the company is “seeing a significant improvement in the level of buyer activity,” he said. “We’re very hopeful.”
Bellmarc, founded by Binder and Marc Broxmeyer in 1979, has roughly 200 agents, Sinnott said.
Citi Habitats shutters two Manhattan offices
Citi Habitats said goodbye to two of its Manhattan offices last month.
The firm shut its Financial District branch at 100 John Street and its office at 346 West 57th Street.
Speaking about the John Street office, Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group, which shares a parent company, NRT, with Citi Habitats, said the lease at the site had expired.
“The lease was up and we didn’t need the space,” Liebman said, adding that the company may open another office in the area in the future. “If it picks up again in the Financial District, we’ll be happy to open another office down there.”
(Downtown residential real estate brokerage New York Living Solutions has signed a lease for the 100 John Street space. See related item in New ventures.)
Meanwhile, according to Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats, all the agents at the firm’s 57th Street office are moving to other Citi Habitats locations. Malin said that because of the two closures, some administrative staff lost their jobs. He did not give a specific number.
“Some of the people were moved to other locations, and some we didn’t have space for,” he said. “This whole economic crisis is a very unfortunate situation, but you have to make good, sound business decisions. People do get impacted.”
Citi Habitats, which has 700-plus agents, has more than 10 other offices in the city, Malin said. “Given the world at large and what’s going on, we felt it was prudent to be proactive and provide more resources to fewer offices,” he said.
According to Malin, the John Street office, which was in a 221-unit luxury rental building, housed roughly 25 agents. The company needed a bigger space, he said, but was reluctant to sign a new lease. “It didn’t make sense to go into a market when there’s so much uncertainty,” he said. “We need to let the financial calamity calm itself down, and find out what the new Wall Street is.”
Homestead leaves home — for good
Homestead New York, the four-year-old boutique sales and rental brokerage firm, is closing shop.
Danny Shamooil, co-owner and co-founder of Homestead, told The Real Deal that the company ceased operations before the new year and is in the process of completing the paperwork required to dissolve the business. The Web site is no longer operational, he said.
Shamooil and co-founder Eli Adahan decided to end their partnership after a series of disagreements this fall, combined with pressure from the dour economic climate, Shamooil said.
“The poor real estate market definitely played a small role,” Shamooil said, adding that while sales had slowed after September’s Wall Street meltdown, a few large deals had helped sustain the company.
Homestead had roughly 35 agents by the time it closed, said Shamooil, who plans to stay in real estate. Homestead started with an office at 102 Fulton Street, specializing in the Financial District, and later expanded with offices on the Upper East Side and in Midtown. The Midtown office, at 900 Eighth Avenue at 54th Street, was the only one still open at the time of the closure, he said.
Domain Properties downsizes, but will stay in business
Fans of Domain Properties will be happy to hear the boutique brokerage hasn’t closed, despite rumors to the contrary.
The real estate company has simply moved, albeit to a space that is 90 percent smaller, from its ground-floor, 5,000-square-foot office on the corner of 25th Street and Broadway, according to CEO Haim Yagen.
In a climate where many firms are closing branches to save money, Domain’s pre-New Year move to the new 500-square-foot space on the second floor at 234 Fifth Avenue at 27th Street was an attempt to cut costs, Yagen said.
“Rents are very high and the market is very [slow],” he said. “Now is the time to shrink.”
The five-year-old company has residential and commercial listings in New York City and abroad. The company represented a buyer in the June 2008 sale of a 6,100-square-foot mixed-used building at 318 East 62nd Street, for $3.9 million.
The new office only has room for about 15 of the company’s 25 agents, Yagen said. The rest are working from home or sharing desks. Yagen said that while the company has attempted to notify all of its clients and business partners, he’s received at least one confused phone call asking if the business had closed. The company’s phone numbers are the same, he said.
Upside abandons residential; Warburg Realty downsizes
Upside Ventures and Warburg Realty have joined the ranks of New York brokerages that are restructuring as a result of the economic downturn.
Upside Ventures has closed its residential brokerage, Upside Residential, for the foreseeable future, according to Ralph Trionfo, the company’s president. Warburg, meanwhile, announced it will shutter its office at 65 West 13th Street.
Trionfo said Upside Ventures, founded in 2001, has halted residential activities in order to focus on its core business: commercial sales and leasing, and investment acquisitions. The firm expanded into residential sales and rentals in 2007, but “it’s not our strength,” Trionfo said.
Now that the residential market has shifted primarily to rentals, “it’s not something that is a priority for us,” Trionfo said, adding that he may look into reviving Uptown Residential in the future.
Trionfo said Upside Ventures now has fewer than five brokers and employees, down from around 13 at its peak. At one point the firm had eight residential brokers, he said, noting that the residential brokers weren’t all let go at once. “It was a gradual move,” he said.
Upside Ventures has not closed any offices, he said, and is still at 595 Madison Avenue at 57th Street.
At Warburg, the shuttering of the 13th Street office will mean pink slips for a sales director and an office manager, said Frederick Peters, president of
Warburg Realty. Agents stationed there were relocated to other Warburg offices, Peters said. He would not comment on how many agents worked in that office. But on the Warburg company blog, Peters wrote: “We are able, because of our substantial investment in technology over the last few years, to offer a number of our agents the opportunity to work principally from home.” Warburg has four other offices in the city for its roughly 150 agents, according to the company’s Web site.
Another residential office closes
Twenty-year-old brokerage firm Brooklyn Properties is closing one of its four offices, at 504 Fifth Avenue in South Park Slope, The Real Deal has confirmed.
The move was an attempt to downsize amid the real estate downturn, said Nalani Clark, principal broker at Brooklyn Properties, adding that the company laid off a secretary in the office but moved the eight agents stationed there to the company’s other locations.
“We needed to cut costs like I’m sure everyone has to,” she said. “We had two other offices in Park Slope already, and we felt that it was the prudent thing to do.”
Clark said the company is closing its two-year-old office on Fifth Avenue, but not the two remaining Park Slope offices, one at 113 Seventh Avenue between Carroll and President streets, and another about 10 blocks away at 213 Seventh Avenue between 3rd and 4th streets, she said. A third office, in Fort Greene, is at 725 Fulton Street at Lafayette Avenue.
The space will be vacant as of this month, said building owner Eli Oved, who is marketing the space himself. The 1,900-square-foot space is available for $5,500 a month, he said. The closing was originally reported on the Web site Brownstoner.
All stories by Candace Taylor. These items were originally reported on The Real Deal’s daily blog.