Ken Krasnow’s new role as executive vice president and director of brokerage services at Trammell Crow Company will involve spreading that commercial firm’s current relatively small reach to more of the tri-state area. To do that, he says he’ll recruit brokers from other firms.
“As a company,” Krasnow told The Real Deal, “Trammell has been pretty public in terms of building and growing their brokerage platform not just in New York but elsewhere, and they’ve now had pretty good success in Chicago and L.A.”
Now, the firm wants to focus closer to its growing Manhattan wing, and Trammell Crow recruited Krasnow from Cushman & Wakefield – and created the brokerage services director position – to help do that. Krasnow, 41, spent his entire 18-year career until December at Cushman & Wakefield, rising to become executive managing director and the global firm’s New York area leader. An oft-referenced Manhattan commercial market expert familiar for his talks at Cushman & Wakefield’s quarterly breakfast presentations – sometimes held at the Midtown power eatery Michael’s – Krasnow had a long roster of corporate tenants. These included the United Way, CBS, JP Morgan Chase, Benetton-USA, and Chubb Insurance. Krasnow also represented buildings such as 51 West 52nd Street (commonly dubbed the Black Rock), 730 Fifth Avenue, 555 Madison Avenue, and 450 Park Avenue.
At Trammell Crow, he will invariably rely on the connections he made at Cushman & Wakefield to grow the firm’s broker force. “Right now,” Krasnow said, “the New York office has about 20 professionals. While I think it’s important for us to have a focus in numbers, it’s also going to be about building the right culture and the right atmosphere.”
As part of that, Krasnow said that over the next 12 to 24 months, he will recruit aggressively for new talent at area colleges and graduate programs, and will “be talking to brokers at other companies” about jumping to Trammell Crow.