The 5 biggest deals of Doug Harmon and Adam Spies’ Cushman era
Doug Harmon and Adam Spies’ seven-year run at Cushman & Wakefield ended last week when the veteran dealmakers jumped to Newmark. Their previous move, to Cushman from Eastdil Secured in 2016, shifted the balance of power among commercial real estate’s top brokerages — a shift that Newmark CEO Barry Gosin would certainly like to replicate.
Harmon and Spies — whose tenures at Eastdil involved deals for the General Motors Building, Stuyvesant Town and Chicago’s Willis Tower — went on to broker several of the city’s biggest commercial transactions during their time at Cushman. Here’s a look back at some of the most important ones:
Property: Chelsea Market
Price: $2.4 billion
Why it mattered: In 2018, Google bought the 1.2 million-square-foot office and retail building in the Meatpacking District that housed some of its offices from its landlord Jamestown in a move that showed the tech giant’s voracious appetite for real estate.
Google already owned the massive former Port Authority building nearby at 111 Eighth Avenue. After the Chelsea Market deal, it went on to buy the Milk Building at 450 West 15th Street for $600 million and its new offices at the St. John’s Terminal for $2.1 billion.
Property: One Manhattan West
Price: $2.85 billion valuation
Why it mattered: It was the city’s last investment deal for a trophy office building before the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes froze the market, and it could be some time before we see another deal like it.
Blackstone bought a 49 percent stake in the 67-story office tower last March from Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority. The deal indicated that even at a time when offices faced an existential crisis, investors were willing to pay big for top-quality assets.
Property: Starrett City
Price: $905 million
Why it mattered: The 5,881-unit Starrett City housing complex in Brooklyn, otherwise known as Spring Creek Towers, is the largest federally subsidized housing campus in the country.
A group of anonymous investors in 2021 sold a 71 percent stake in the property to Brooksville Companies and Rockpoint Group, which already owned a piece of the complex. The sale valued the complex at $1.8 billion.
The deal wasn’t without its share of controversy: Not only was former President Donald Trump a stakeholder, but other investors in the 153-acre site — relatives of Disque D. Deane, who spearheaded development of the complex in the 1970s — sued to block the sale, which they claimed was opaque and rife with conflicts of interest. A judge eventually approved the deal.
American Copper Buildings
Price: $837 million
Why it mattered: Late 2021 was a moment in time the city may never see again. The rental market was blazing as tenants returned from a pandemic exodus. Measured by cap rates, New York City’s rental buildings were relatively cheap compared to overheated markets in the Sun Belt, and investors were hungry for free-market properties after changes to the state’s rent law in 2019.
A partnership between Josh Gotlib’s Black Spruce Management and Meyer Orbach’s Orbach Affordable Housing Solutions bought the 760-unit American Copper Buildings from Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group and the Baupost Group. It was one of two multifamily deals — the other was Blackstone’s purchase of the Gehry Building at 8 Spruce Street for $930 million — that capped off a wild end to 2021.
Property: The Mountain
Price: Unsold
Why it matters: During their time at Cushman, Harmon and Spies made a decision to branch out to new kinds of deals. Nothing exemplifies that quite like the assignment to sell The Mountain in Beverly Hills — a 157-acre development site overlooking Los Angeles.
The property, which had previously been listed at $1 billion, had been linked to Jeff Bezos, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, but struggled to lock in a buyer and became embroiled in legal disputes. It remains unsold.