Phoenix Rising: Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s Jeff Rosenblatt, Post Kent Swig

One of the tricks to Mr. Rosenblatt’s early success was that he treated landlord assignments more like tenant work.

“A lot of landlord brokers would wait for tenants or brokers to come knocking,” Mr. Rosenblatt said. “If you were representing a tenant, though, you would always be knocking on doors to find space for them or to try to find clients. And that’s the approach I took—if I had a space to fill, I was out there actively looking for tenants.”

By the mid-1980s, Mr. Rosenblatt received recognition for his work, winning the Real Estate Board of New York’s prestigious Most Ingenious Deal of the Year award for helping to convert 1414 Avenue of the Americas into a showroom building for shoe makers, a thriving tenant group of the day.

A perusal of his recent deals would hardly provide a clue there was ever a hitch in his career.

In recent years, Mr. Rosenblatt led successful leasing campaigns at 5 Columbus Circle, a building he has been representing for almost 20 years. Late last year he negotiated two leases totalling 17,000 square feet at the 220,000-square-foot property. Before that, he filled several floors when the building’s biggest tenant, the Hearst Corporation, vacated to consolidate space at its new Eighth Avenue headquarters.

With his typical approach of aggressively scouring the market for potential replacement space users, Mr. Rosenblatt quickly discovered that developer Gary Barnett was trying to clear tenants from a property he owned nearby, 225 West 57th Street, a building Mr. Barnett recently reached a deal to redevelop and partially lease to the department store Nordstrom in one of the year’s biggest retail deals. Mr. Rosenblatt helped to pave the way for that transaction, albeit indirectly, by taking several tenants from the property and relocating them to 5 Columbus Circle.

More recently he brought the CUNY School for Professional Studies into an approximately 70,000-square-foot space at 116 West 32nd Street for 15 years. Mr. Rosenblatt spurred that lease when, knowing the space would appeal to an educational tenant, he pitched the floors to brokers at Newmark who represent tenants in that sector and happened to have the requirement for CUNY.

Other brokerage companies noticed Mr. Rosenblatt’s talent. In the late 1990s he was recruited by Bruce Mosler to join Cushman & Wakefield (CWK). After a stint there he joined Grubb & Ellis.

Helmsley-Spear, however, was the most difficult point of a midcareer search for the right platform for his skills.

Mr. Rosenblatt remembers moving into Helmsley-Spears’ offices at 60 East 42nd Street, the same space from which the legendary Harry Helmsley, a founder of Helmsley-Spear, once ran his real estate empire. The space, in many ways, looked much like it probably did in the 1950s, without computers or other modern infrastructure like phone systems or document storage.

“You practically felt like the ghost of Harry Helmsley was going to walk out and greet you,” Mr. Rosenblatt recalled.

When news of Mr. Swig’s financial difficulties, including numerous defaults and foreclosures on his buildings, began to circulate through the industry, it became even harder to do deals. Mr. Swig, however, was reassuring.

“He never showed signs of stress,” Mr. Rosenblatt said, recounting how Mr. Swig would reassure staff he was going to get through his difficulties.

Eventually Helmsley-Spears’ offices were moved to 770 Lexington Avenue, a building where Mr. Swig had space for Terra Holdings, parent of Brown Harris Stevens, a residential brokerage that he co-chairs. Construction of Helmsley-Spears’ offices was never fully finished, and staff occupied offices that were in disarray and without even basic supplies such as pens. A staircase that had been planned between the brokerage’s floors was halted, leaving a gaping hole in the floor that had to be cordoned off to prevent employees from taking an accidental fall.

“It was just impossible to do deals,” Mr. Rosenblatt said.