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Ramped up brokerage rivalry: Eastdil vs. Cushman
With the Harmon and Spies power duo leaving for Cushman, a new rivalry emerges for wrangling trophy towers
From the November issue: The bombshell news last month that New York City’s top two investments sales brokers, Doug Harmon and Adam Spies, decamped for Cushman & Wakefield after years at Eastdil Secured is still being digested and dissected in the industry.
The move — which Eastdil’s CEO, Roy March, was told about on the phone just minutes before it was reported in the press — shifts the playing field in the ultra-competitive world of selling $1 billion-plus trophy New York City properties.
It also unlocks Eastdil’s long-standing stranglehold on the upper echelon of the investments sales market, a reality that sources say could ratchet up poaching and broker churn at the two firms and beyond.
This kind of high-level reshuffling is something the industry hasn’t seen in decades.
“Eastdil is certainly changed forever,” said Eric Anton, senior managing director at the national real estate capital intermediary HFF. “Interestingly, during the last 20 years, many of the top brokers in the city have not changed. Only their business cards have changed.”
Indeed, Harmon and Spies — who joined Eastdil in 1993 and 1999, respectively — both started their commercial brokerage careers as newbies at the firm. But with the help of the long-haired rainmaker March they catapulted themselves (and their company) to the top of the city’s investment sales food chain, outselling their closest competitors by billions of dollars a year. [more]