Darcy Stacom and Wendy Silverstein On Their New Firm and the State of CRE

Long live the Queens. 

Darcy Stacom and Wendy Silverstein are icons in the world of commercial real estate, and although it is Stacom who has the nickname “The Queen of Skyscrapers” she’d happily share her crown with Silverstein, her business partner and friend of more than 20 years. 

Among her many career highlights: Stacom was a broker with CBRE (CBRE) from 2002 to 2024 before striking out on her own and founding Stacom CRE. She’s worked on some of the most headline-grabbing, expensive multifamily and office deals in New York City and the nation, including the $5.4 billion sale of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town in 2006 and the $2.8 billion sale of the General Motors Building two years later. She also helped to sell the Chrysler Building in 2019 to Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs.   

Silverstein — no relation to legendary developer Larry Silverstein — made a name for herself at Vornado Realty Trust (VNO), where she spent 17 years helping transform the firm from being known as an owner of New Jersey strip malls into a $30 billion giant in the CRE space. She also spent a year as chief investment officer at WeWork, founded her own advisory firm in 2020 — Silver Eagle Advisory Group — and spent a year and a half as CEO of New York REIT. 

Separately, these dynamic women helped shape the New York City real estate landscape over the last 30 years. Neither has plans to slow down soon. The pair recently teamed to combine their skills and experience to launch StacomSilverstein, a boutique capital markets real estate advisory firm based in New York City.

Stacom and Silverstein met back in the 1990s after hearing about one another and their respective careers. They’d never actually worked together, however, having been somewhat siloed by their male colleagues.  

“Darcy would call me and ask me to go out to lunch,” Silverstein said. “And I really credit her with being the woman who reached out for the woman. And so we started off, quite frankly, as friends, even more than business counterparties.”

Stacom and Silverstein, who serve as co-CEOs of their firm, recently sat down with Commercial Observer to discuss some of their career highlights, what it takes to become titans in the New York City real estate scene, and the state of the CRE market. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: How did the two of you first become partners?

Darcy Stacom: We did two big deals together. Wendy was brought in as an adviser — after she left Vornado — by Trinity Church for their big 11-building portfolio down in Hudson Square. And she felt that the team that was on it wasn’t the right team.

So, she brought me in, and we ended up doing the $3.5 billion transaction that then led to Hines coming into the deal. Then, years later, she moved over to run New York REIT, and was one of the first female heads of a REIT — certainly the first in New York. 

She was dissolving the REIT and had inherited a broker [who was assigned to marketing the assets] and had a bunch of the listings. And again, she felt that she wanted me. Which is the highest compliment, not only because we knew how to work together but also because she was willing to stick her neck out for me.

Wendy Silverstein: I had to go to the board, and they didn’t love the fact that I wanted to bring in yet another broker. But we were selling $4.5 billion worth of real estate in New York City, and I felt, and they eventually agreed, that whatever increment we had to pay for Darcy would be more than made up for because she was on the deal. And that’s ultimately how it worked out.

How did that moment lead you to start StacomSilverstien?

Stacom: I had decided that I really didn’t want to renew at CBRE to the extent that I didn’t want to have to continue to chase market share. Because, when you’re one of the big shops, all they want to hear is that you were No. 1 in capital markets in the biggest city in the country.  So it becomes something where you have to take every listing, and you have to pursue every lead, no matter what, because each one could lead to the next one, which could lead to the bigger one. And, when you’ve done it for a long time, and you’ve been No. 1, it just after awhile is not as interesting.

So I decided to go out on my own. And I really thought long and hard about whether I could retire. After running this hard for this long, I was not ready to retire, so I founded Stacom CRE. Wendy and I were still talking, and she had said to me that she wasn’t ready to retire, either. 

Silverstein: I had been serially retiring for 10 years and, honestly, each time I tried I’d think, “I’ve got it this time.” But after watching Darcy — and I did try and convince her to retire, too — she’s like, “Nah, I can’t do it.” So, I finally woke up and said, “She’s right. I’m wrong.” So I called Darcy and I said, “How about we go do this together?” And she said “Come on in.” 

Our goals and aspirations for what this will be and what it won’t be are exactly aligned. We don’t care about market share. We’re not out to prove who we are. We’re out to be able to create a firm that’s got a breadth of expertise between the two of us. And we can put it all together to be able to really give great in-depth advice to the clients that we want to work with, on the deals that we think are meaty and complex. It’s what we like, it’s what we excel at, and we’ll have some fun while doing it.

Commercial real estate is a notoriously male-dominated industry. How did you both navigate that through your careers?

Silverstein: By never even thinking about being the only woman in the room. It doesn’t matter until somebody else makes it matter in a negative connotation, and then you don’t let them get away with it. And, really, the best way not to let anybody get away with it is just to speak your mind when you have something to say, and recognize that a lot of the time if you’re in the room, it’s because you’re really smart. Because it was a lot harder for you to get there than for a lot of the other people who are not female.

Stacom: It’s also learning that when somebody comes after you in that room, it’s not because you’re a female — they’re after everybody in that room. They may come after you a little harder if you’re a woman, and maybe you do want to be a little bit more prepared. So when somebody would come after me, I would just be like “OK, let’s go.”

Can you give us an example?

Stacom: In the middle of a negotiation I had one guy call me a bitch. I was like, “Well let’s talk about that.” You’re going to have things like that happen, and, in the moment, you just have to let it roll right off your back. You can get angry when you get home. It was actually the guy’s partner who ended up calling me to apologize.

I remember once landing a huge listing and there were lots of lawyers — maybe 15 people on the interviewing side, and there were five of us presenting. And, when I pitched I talked to everybody in the room, including the person at the end of the table who was just taking notes quietly the entire time. Guess what? She was the lead lawyer on the transaction, and she told me that in all the interviews not a single man looked at her. 

Silverstein: I had an experience once where the principal on the opposite side never made eye contact with me. So I sat at the table, and I never took my eyes off this person who was across the table for me, who, after a half hour of talking to everybody in the room but me — I timed it — finally made eye contact with me. I just never took my eyes off them. I just made it perfectly clear that I’m just looking at you, and eventually you are going to have to turn and look at me. 

It’s such an old cliche, but it is true: If you’re a smart, tough woman, you’re going to be called a bitch. It just happens.

Let’s talk markets, specifically Midtown and office assets. What are you seeing and hearing there?

Stacom: A lot of companies are back to five days a week, and a lot are four days a week. Five days a week is great for the office market. Four days a week you still have to have office space, and even three days a week you really still have to have office space. It was the top 5 percent of the space. It’s now the top 20 percent of the space that’s getting real demand. I’m hearing in the Class B sector that the top 20 percent of B is getting real demand. 

The problem is net effective rents in that sector. And, even as you get low in the Class A, there still needs to be improvements. Work letters, base building work commissions, etc., are expensive for transactions, so that needs to settle out some before I think we’re going to see a wide range of investors come back to this market and be just trading office buildings again the way they were previously. 

Silverstein: Like every other market, it is supply and demand driven. Obviously, with the work from home, and then its moribund return to work from the office, the demand side was super weak. What that also translated into is there’s no new supply. Unless J.P. Morgan is building its own headquarters or Citadel is building its own headquarters, there is not essentially new supply to the market. 

But the market is clearly getting better. You have to remember, we’re overlaying this with high interest rates — higher interest rates than we’ve seen for a very long time. All of this does not play well into a levered asset class like real estate. So there’s still multiple headwinds. But, in my opinion, there’s no question that you could start to feel the market turning.

Darcy, can you tell us about your experience selling the GM Building for $2.8 billion in 2008?

Stacom: GM was fascinating. I’d clearly carved out quite a career, and I’d finished Stuy Town at that point. So, the Macklowes called and said, “We’re doing interviews in two days for the sale of GM” — because they had the debt distress. Then I picked up the phone and called a colleague in London and said, “I will pay anything, any plane flight costs, I just want you on a plane tomorrow” — because I’d worked with him before, and he did that. We worked all through the night to put our pitch together. 

We went in to present, but I didn’t think I had their vote. We did a great presentation, but something felt off. But they called the next day. So I guess father and son [Harry and Billy Macklowe] worked out whatever it was. So they said, “We’re going to give you the listing, but you have to be in the market in three days.” And we were in the market in three days. 

We just stayed up all night, and we just crushed our way through it. We had Boston Properties [now BXP] buying the asset. I landed in Big Sky, Montana, for a family vacation, and Bear Stearns filed for bankruptcy. The first call I get is from Billy Macklowe telling me to get on a plane and get back. 

So I did. It was a wild, wild ride. We had tax structuring issues we had to figure out, and eventually we’re able to put it back together by bringing more assets into play. But the deal died for a period of time. It was wild. 

Is there a climate for another kind of sale like that in the city today?

Stacom: If one of the best of the best assets came up, could you do a 50 percent right now? Probably. One hundred percent, that would be hard, because the debt market just isn’t there.  The debt market is just too expensive. So it would have to be a best of best that has existing in-place debt, that has term left at a low interest rate. 

Even that, a buyer would discount the value of it, knowing that eventually they were likely to pay more. Could you sell 20 percent? Yes. Could you sell at 30 percent? Yes. These checks are getting so large. We’re going to see more and more sales at 10 percent and 15 percent of buildings in order to move the real estate. 

Wendy, can you share a little about your experience as CEO of New York REIT?

Silverstein: Honestly, it was a check-the-box experience. I’d spent a lot of time in a public company, and I was coming out of one of my serial retirements, and I saw the opportunity. I had a great time coming in to do it. It was complex. I pride myself on the fact that it came up to speed on these assets extremely quickly. Obviously, I hired the right team to help me. We were extremely thin-staffed. But I got my arms around it, and basically moved all the assets in about a year and a half, which was a lot of assets to sell. 

So it was a great experience. And I got to be a public company CEO, and it pretty much cured me for ever wanting to do it again. 

What can we expect from StacomSilverstein? Who are the clients you are pursuing and working with? What kind of deals are you going after?

Silverstein: Together, we have the experience and expertise to advise and execute on a broad range of opportunities. Ideally, we seek smart, well-capitalized investors who are looking for significant new opportunities or navigating their way through complicated existing situations and want us to play a meaningful role in helping them achieve their goals.

We are relatively agnostic as to product type and geography, but we both love and know New York, which continues to be one of the world’s most investable markets. Helping international clients navigate the complexities of investing in any type of asset class here would certainly be one of our priorities. We are ready to provide strategic and/or restructuring advice to entities that want to dispose of, or maximize the value and efficiency of, real estate assets. We love size and complexity, and we are really good at it. So, ideally, we are looking for opportunities to bring our A game to those types of situations.