Prominent real estate broker Bob Knakal has launched his own firm roughly one month after getting axed from JLL.
On Tuesday morning Knakal announced the start of Bob Knakal Real Estate Advisors, which will focus on sales, debt and equity in the city. The firm is starting out with a team of about six people in a Midtown office but is looking for more permanent space and aiming to grow to a team of between 15 and 20 people.
The company will mainly focus on representing sellers of land and multifamily buildings, and New York will be its only market, Knakal said.
“We’ve not been tempted to go outside New York like a lot of folks have. I don’t know anything about any other market,” he told Crain’s. “I’ve been here my whole career, and I’m going to stay here.”
Knakal was abruptly let go from JLL in February after spending about six years with the firm. He had come to the brokerage in 2018 after his contract was terminated at Cushman & Wakefield, which bought his old firm, Massey Knakal, in 2014 for a reported $100 million.
His departure from JLL came almost immediately after a profile of him in The New York Times that was very complimentary but mentioned JLL just once. A statement JLL’s New York president, Peter Riguardi, gave to The Real Deal after Knakal was fired in which he said putting the client first, JLL second and the individual third was “the true recipe for success” indicated that the Times article may have played a role in the firm’s decision to let go of Knakal.
However, the official reason for his termination was that his job had become redundant, according to Knakal.
Knakal defended his relatively frequent media appearances in an interview with Crain’s about his new firm. He said they are always in service of trying to get a better deal for his clients, as there is always a chance a prospective buyer will be in the audience.
“You could look at it and say, ‘Well, Knakal is just out for himself,'” he said. “But the reality is, what I’m trying to do is increase the probability that I’m going to get in the way of information that is going to inure to the benefit of my client.”
Artificial intelligence will play a major role in Knakal’s new firm, he said. It will mainly focus on using the burgeoning technology to improve its analysis of the market and allow the firm to reach more people.
Knakal is at least the third big name in New York real estate to start his own firm in recent months. Darcy Stacom, another star broker, left her position at CBRE after 22 years shortly before Knakal’s departure from JLL to launch Stacom CRE, and longtime Silverstein Properties CEO Marty Burger has started his own firm, Infinity Global Real Estate Partners, after Silverstein abruptly replaced him late last year.
“One of the byproducts of technology becoming so popular is that the need to be at a big shop is becoming marginalized,” Knakal said. “Through technology, you can achieve a lot of the things that you used to have to go to a big shop to achieve.”
Eddie Small , 2024-04-02 13:48:08
Source link
