It seemed the company’s growth, which relied on moving into territories and stationing sales staff to focus on these new areas, had ground to a halt. Even the company’s image took a battering. Ken Krasnow, a top manager at the firm who oversaw sales staff, was found to have let his brokerage license lapse, drawing embarrassing ire from state regulators after a real estate trade publication published the results of its own investigation.
Mr. Massey had the composure to grasp the opportunity of the moment. Companies were shedding staff, and brokers at rival firms were unhappy amid the paltry business. It was during this period that Mr. Knakal hired Garrett Thelander, a former banker at Anglo Irish Bank who had left the embattled institution, to help start a mortgage brokerage arm.
Though the firm had grown to handle more transaction volume than any other commercial real estate brokerage company in Manhattan, with Mr. Thelander’s hiring, Mr. Massey saw the potential to tap into a market more vast than even the pool of 1 million commercial buildings in the city.
“The building sales business was a $35 billion annualized market at its peak,” Mr. Massey said. “The mortgage business is a $40 billion market. It’s a significant market, and many of the clients are the same as on the sales side. I asked myself, why aren’t we doing this?”
The underpinnings of the company’s growth, however, were laid by more fundamental decisions Mr. Massey made years ago. In the late 1990s, he began professionalizing the company’s management, installing chief financial officers, marketing staff and other executives.
“CBRE (CBRE) is the mothership for me,” Mr. Massey said. “They set the model for a professionally managed brokerage.”
With Mr. Massey mostly content to work behind the scenes, Mr. Knakal has always been the public face of Massey Knakal and the archetype of its success.
He built himself into a deal-making power broker not through the corporate heft of his company, but by self-sufficiently crafting his brand, relentlessly working the real estate speaking circuit, authoring myriad newspaper columns and networking.
And yet it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Knakal would have been quite as successful without the platform Mr. Massey has focused on building—a fact Mr. Knakal readily admits.
“I’m a big believer in the territory system we have here, and we’ve benefited from it like everyone else here has,” Mr. Knakal said.
“Paul and I have always just gravitated toward opposite sides of the business, and I think that’s why we’ve been successful working together.”
