Mitchel Flaherty.
Mitchel Flaherty, 29
Director in Investment Sales at B6 Real Estate Advisors
Ask Mitchel Flaherty when he went back to the office, and the B6 Real Estate Advisors executive is quick to answer. “I never really left, to be honest,” he said with a shrug over video chat. “July last year or something, I was coming in most days.”
Flaherty has channeled that work ethic — up at 5 a.m. most weekdays and into the office around 7 a.m. — into a quick rise in his adopted country. Raised in the London suburbs and educated in the British capital, he started his career as an appraiser. It wasn’t the most exciting work, according to Flaherty himself, but he learned what drives value in properties. He soon moved into brokerage.
It was while brokering deals in London that a friend connected Flaherty with Paul Massey, the New York real estate impresario who started B6 Advisors in 2018. The friend had done business with Massey Knakal, Massey’s old firm. Flaherty and Massey met, got on, and soon the Londoner was a New Yorker focusing on investment sales in the Bronx. Flaherty started at B6 in January 2019.
He saw the Bronx in particular as teeming with possibilities given its proximity to Manhattan. Working as a self-described team of one through B6, Flaherty sizes up potential deals for owners and executes them. Flaherty had listed, contracted or sold $56.5 million in property in 2021 as of early October. His biggest deal of the past 12 months involved going to contract on the sale of a 250,000-square-foot mixed-use development site in the Mott Haven section; it had an asking price of $23.5 million.
How’d he get owners interested in a 20-something international transplant in the first place? Good, old-fashioned cold calling and flooding the zone with market know-how. “Over time they realize they really want to talk to you because you educate them,” Flaherty said.
The executive said he takes particular pride in negotiating deals that end up creating affordable housing. “I know it sounds a bit cliché, but it feels like you’re doing something a bit bigger than yourself given the fact that there’s an affordable housing crisis.”—T.A.
