Michael and Paul Ippolito
Executive VPs and Principals, Newmark & Co.
–Although the Ippolito brothers, Michael and Paul, joined Newmark at a difficult time, they were rescued by a winning attitude. “We came to Newmark in 1991 at a very hard time and we needed to be creative with ideas and solutions in a market where things weren’t happening,” said Michael, who arrived from Helmsley-Spear’s Empire State Building office while older brother Paul sold ad space for a publisher. In today’s more sophisticated environment where deals call for “more analytical work, due diligence and strategic thought” creativity has served the Ippolitos well. The reward is considerable peer respect and current recognition as Newmark’s top brokers for 2003, which Michael Ippolito describes as “a very, very busy year.”
The Ippolitos teamed up in 1996 and now head an 11-person team that handles both strategic and transactional work for clients on a global scale cutting across different cultures and currencies. The team’s most remarkable transaction in 2003 was a 475,000 square foot deal that negotiated long-term client Double Click out of a 400,000 square foot space at 450 West 33rd Street and relocated the company to a 75,000 square foot space at 111 Eighth Avenue. The deal was not easy considering there was better space in other parts of the city, but in the end, the team got former Rockefeller Center tenant the Associated Press to take up 300,000 square feet, with the other 100,000 square feet going to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Given the global scale of their transactions and the division of labor involved, the Ippolitos consider their two-man team model indispensable. “You couldn’t do the kind of work we do without a team. It would be physically impossible,” Paul says.
Mitch Steir
President & CEO, Studley
–Mitch Steir found his niche in life when he stopped selling computers and moved into commercial real estate in the early 1980s. “Being a real estate broker is in my blood and I’m glad we found each other,” said Steir, who arrived at Studley in 1988 after starting out at Huberth and Peters, an old New York real estate company that broke up the year after he departed.
His most important transaction in 2003 was the deal for Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, in which the venerable law firm took 460,000 square feet of space at One World Financial Center under a 20-year lease. Aside from keeping “a firm synonymous with Lower Manhattan” in the area, Steir said the deal, which closed in March, was also significant for being “the largest new transaction to happen in close proximity” to the World Trade Center since Sept. 11 – other companies like American Express simply returned to their old spaces. Cadwalader took over space from Lehman Brothers (who were represented by CB Richard Ellis), but the deal was eventually completed not as a sublease but as a direct deal from the owner, Brookfield Financial Properties. Since Cadwalader& 39;s former offices at 100 Maiden Lane are being converted to a residential building, the deal resulted in a net positive absorption of 400,000 square feet in the area.
Steir said he enjoys the challenge of commercial leasing because “every day is a new day,” though he admits that some days can be a bit frustrating. “But the upside outweighs the downside.”
Frank Doyle
Managing Director, New York Region, Jones Lang LaSalle
–When Frank Doyle left his investment banking job at Drexel Burnham Lambert, he began a new career at Jones Lang LaSalle, where he remains 17 years later, a managing director of the firm and its top New York broker for 2003.
As a founding member of the New York office of the global firm, he has carved out a niche in representing landlords and tenants in Midtown’s trophy properties.
Last year was a strong year for Doyle despite it being a “tough year” in which the market “stood still” for the first nine months.
His most ingenious deal in 2003 involved filling up 60,000 square feet of space for his client Boston Properties at more than $60 a square foot in a weak market. That deal involved two floors vacated by O’Melveny & Meyers in midtown’s Citigroup Center in April. The deal also saved the incoming tenants, a law firm and an investment bank, $50 per square foot in build-out costs because the space already fit their needs.
Doyle says the most enjoyable part of his job are the people and the culture at his firm, which he has helped shape over the past 17 years, as well as the sheer satisfaction of recalling his best deals as he walks by his trophy buildings.
But he doesn’t enjoy being thrust into situations he can’t control, such as market conditions that clamp his preferred high deal flow rate, much like last year.
“Everyone wants the market and the economy to be robust.”
David Hoffman, Jr.
Executive Managing Director, Colliers ABR
–Since joining the firm in 1988, David Hoffman, Jr., has come a long way up in the ranks of Colliers ABR, where he started out as a junior broker.
Today, he wears the hats of co-owner, board member and co-head of the brokerage division of the independently owned New York office of Boston-based Colliers. Before Colliers, the Manhattan native spent his college summers at Cross & Brown Co., where his father was an executive.
Hoffman mostly represents landlords, and in one of his larger deals in 2003, he represented landlord AEW Capital Management when the Epstein Becker & Green law firm renewed and expanded its lease at 250 Park Avenue from 75,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet for a 15-year term. The deal took place in a soft market when the law firm could have gone elsewhere.
More significantly, Hoffman considers the 234,000 square foot leasing deal he did for landlord TIAA-CREF with tenant Fairchild Publications at 750 Third Avenue as “one of the largest, least contentious deals” he had ever done, marked by the spectacular degree of cooperation by both sides.
He most enjoys the challenge of “breaking down” clients’ initial stereotypical worries about dealing with brokers, and turning them into trusting and satisfied clients. But the hard part is that “as a broker, you rarely exercise a great deal of control over what people ultimately want to do.”
Dirk Hrobsky
Vice President, Trammell Crow
–At 32, the New Jersey native and Texas-based Trammell Crow’s top company-wide broker in 2003 seems poised to spend time in the uppermost reaches of the industry. Since coming over from GVA Williams about two years ago to start New York operations for Trammell, Hrobsky has clearly set the sky as his limit, taking on the firm’s local and international operations.
Hrobsky’s biggest deal in 2003 was the five-year build-to-suit leasing deal for the consolidation of the American operations of South Africa-based South African Paper and Pulp, Inc. (SAPPI) in a 600,000 square foot industrial space in South Brunswick, New Jersey. Hrobsky’s team beat out at least three other strong competitors to snag the logistics-heavy relocation of SAPPI’s operations from three different geographical locations to one, set to be completed this October. Until the project is finally done, the challenge is “so many moving pieces to manage at once and building trust at the same time.”
The SAPPI deal, the largest last year for the firm’s New York office, earned Hrobsky a Deal of the Year nomination by the National Association of Industrial Office Properties (NAIOP) for 2003. Hrobsky attributes his quick rise to his trademark principles of “trust, relationships and leverage,” which results in a lot of repeat business from well-served and appreciative clients. “My customers are my best sales people.” What he enjoys most about his job is access to interesting people and projects, but the human variables that are “absolutely beyond your control” is the real challenge in the job.
Bradley Gerla
Senior Vice President, CB Richard Ellis
–Brad Gerla has spent 24 years in commercial leasing since taking his first job at Jones Lang Wooten, now Jones Lang LaSalle. In 1998, he joined ESG, which became part of CBRE in 2003. Real estate is something of a family business for the Long Island native, since his father and uncle both worked as developers. Gerla says he chose a career in leasing because development work is more one-sided and he likes the interaction with both sides that leasing involves. “I like the deal making process, I’m a people person. It’s a lot more fun that way.”
Gerla’s niche is the downtown area, and his biggest deals in 2003 involved representing the landlord at 55 Water Street. J.P. Morgan Chase departed the 3.6 million square foot building in 2002, leaving behind a vacancy of 1.4 million square feet of space in the country’s second largest office building after Chicago’s Sears Tower. Through “creative packaging” Gerla’s team disposed of 780,000 square feet of space, over half the vacant space, in three separate transactions with insurance company HIP (560,000 square feet), the Teachers Retirement System of New York (160,000 square feet) and Liberty Insurance (60,000 square feet).
Gerla considers it impressive that HIP left the midtown market to relocate to downtown, bringing with it over 1,800 workers. “It’s very rare for tenants to come downtown and take over half a million square feet of space.”
Gerla enjoys the personal interaction involved in leasing, but said the downside is that “you could work years on a deal and it could fall apart for any reason whatsoever.”
Merrill Roth
Executive Managing Director, Grubb & Ellis, New York
–Twenty-five years after arriving in the world of commercial leasing from a sales and management job at Xerox, Merrill Roth has stayed strong in the game, moving from Edward S. Gordon Co. (later Insignia/ESG) to Grubb & Ellis. His long experience and skills have now positioned him as the nationwide top broker at Grubb & Ellis.
Roth recalls 2003 as quite a successful year for the six-person team he heads, though he admits the year was “very difficult” in commercial leasing due to market and pricing instability created both by landlords putting up unleased space and tenants dumping space via subleases. Among his most significant deals were the subleases he handled in New York for Instinet Corporation, a long-term client of his company that was adjusting its space after an acquisition. He also recounts the “tremendous creativity” shown by his team towards the end of 2003 when it was involved in subletting 108,000 square feet of space at The Reuters Building at a time when most competitors were not leasing at all, plus an additional 55,000 square feet in two different subleases in other locations in the city.
Roth’s team also pulled off the largest leasing deal in Connecticut in 2003 in transactions exceeding 200,000 square feet on behalf of Dow Chemical in Danbury, Connecticut.
Roth attributes his team’s performance to its “unique” mix of people with corporate and real estate management backgrounds and to the practice of senior team members in staying hands-on with deals from start to finish.
John Cefaly
Vice Chairman, Cushman & Wakefield
–After 33 long years in the brokerage business, running the New York operations of major global player Cushman & Wakefield, John Cefaly’s A-plus track record shows how experience can translate into strong results and dollar signs. Cefaly was Cushman & Wakefield’s top broker last year, a repeat of the honor he achieved in 2002. The view from the top wasn’t new to him – for the past decade he’d been among the firm’s top five producers.
Among his transactions in 2003, he considers the lease renewal for New York Presbyterian Hospital on 38th Street off First Avenue one of his biggest deals. Navigating the layers of direct leases and subleases involved, Cefaly structured a 20-year deal that secured the hospital 236,000 square feet of space with a consolidated direct lease. He also lists his work on the AON deal, in which he secured an assignment of the insurance broker’s lease on its 200,000-square foot space on Third Avenue to Pfizer, in order to get around the sublease restrictions on AON’s lease and facilitating its move to Park Avenue and 199 Water Street.
What fascinates him about life in commercial leasing? “The personal interaction, the creativity in transactions and all the challenges to overcome.” Cefaly credits his long experience for his success, especially his skill in “being able to work with landlords” in representing his tenants.