Savills’ Geoffrey Newman Wins REBNY’s Top Dealmaker Award

A coveted Gramercy Park assemblage hit a maze of obstacles as Savills’ Geoffrey Newman began stitching together a deal for Legion Investment Group’s Victor Sigoura.

The six-property assemblage offered a rare opportunity for Gramercy Park frontage. But a 34-unit co-op, an adjacent building with rent-stabilized tenants, complex zoning rules and environmental contamination made it far more complicated than typical assemblage deals.

After two failed deals with different buyers and 13 years of wrangling by Newman, Legion and partner Gindi Capital closed in 2025 on the final two properties in the assemblage. The marathon effort was crowned on Monday with commercial real estate’s top honor: the Real Estate Board of New York’s Most Ingenious Deal of the Year.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time … but I have never read a submission where I literally lost track of the number of ingenious solutions required to enable the transaction to move forward,” said Branton Realty Services’ Woody Heller, who presented the award in a room packed with brokers at Lever House.

The deal included acquiring air rights and negotiating a cantilever that would extend over portions of the co-op building, helping push shareholders toward a collective sale. The deal triggered two lawsuits when the co-op board and shareholders challenged the arrangement, forcing Newman to renegotiate the transaction from scratch.

Negotiations stretched over several years while Newman also navigated tax complications tied to co-op dissolution. The adjacent property added another layer of complexity due to its rent-regulated tenants. And zoning constraints due to the so-called Sliver Law required additional maneuvering.

As the deal neared the finish line, a former dry cleaner was found to have contaminated the site, triggering state environmental oversight and putting the acquisition financing at risk. Rather than delay closing, Newman enrolled the property in the Brownfield Cleanup Program and arranged a state-supervised cleanup.

The developers are planning a 20-story condo that is shaping up to be the largest new development along the park in a century.

“This deal required 13 years of persistence, countless individual negotiations and the ability to solve one impossible problem after another,” Newman said.