After working long hours showing office and retail spaces to clients, some of the city’s commercial brokers show just as much intensity once they get on the ball fields, taking part in the Real Estate Softball League.
The league saw an upset last year when Robert K. Futterman & Associates took the championship in its first year on the field. RKF beat reigning champion Massey Knakal, who with an undefeated 4-0 record so far this year appeared to be leading the league again as of press time.
The league has been playing in Central Park for the past 30 years or so, although nobody who spoke with The Real Deal — not even league commissioner James Saunders — could say precisely how old it is.
Each team plays eight games during the regular season, which spans from mid-May to the end of July. The regular season is followed by a two-week playoff in which each team plays one to three games.
Most of the players range from 25 to 35 years old, although Saunders said at least one player is around 60 years old.
Every team captain who spoke to The Real Deal said they believed their team would be champions this season, a testament to the competitive nature of the players. However, the games are played in good spirits, according to Saunders, whose day job is senior managing director at Newmark Knight Frank.
“We’re all just big kids doing what we were doing when we were little kids,” he said. “It’s a terrific forum for competing brokers to put their business competition aside and play each other.”
Cameron Mitchell, associate broker at Massey Knakal and captain of its softball team, had a less-friendly opinion on the matter. “These are our competitors in the industry to begin with,” he said. “So it just adds to the fact that we want to beat them.”
The list of participating firms has fluctuated throughout the years, although CB Richard Ellis, Cushman & Wakefield, GVA Williams and Newmark Knight Frank are mainstays. In addition to those four, Massey Knakal, Marcus & Millichap, Robert K. Futterman and Winick Realty Group make up the rest of the league this year.
The 2008 season introduces another new and relatively small firm to the league: Winick Realty. Winick was hopeful about its prospects after taking a win against CB Richard Ellis in their first game. They subsequently lost to Cushman & Wakefield.
“[Our opponents] aren’t as excited as we are, because it’s our first year,” said Joseph Isa, senior director at Winick and captain of the softball team. “And since we are the new guys on the block, there’s a little uncertainty about us.”
Note: Correction appended
As evidenced by the recent success of relatively small firms Massey Knakal and RKF, the size of a company, and thus its pool of potential team members, does not necessarily determine a team’s success. (This contrasts with college sports, where larger schools are assumed to have better teams and are placed in a different division.)
“Some of the larger companies have tryouts,” Isa said. “I didn’t even know if we had enough guys [for a team], but the response was tremendous.”
Mitchell lauded support from his firm’s executives as a driving force in the team’s success.
“Maybe in other places, people are pressured to work, and they sneak out of the office to play softball,” Mitchell said. “At our games, [Massey Knakal co-founder and CEO] Paul Massey comes out, in a suit, and watches us. And it’s a big deal when the top guys are huge proponents of the company softball team.”