Savills’ $1.1B Eastdil Secured Buy Creates Some Tantalizing Possibilities

Last month, Savills, the global, Britain-based real estate brokerage services firm, executed a coup: $1.1 billion to buy Eastdil Secured.

Aside from the dollar figures involved, the deal was a play for Savills to reintroduce itself as both the new kid on the block and a force to be reckoned with in the U.S. market where Eastdil had long been one of the dominant players.

Which leaves a lot of real estate observers wondering what the firms will do for each other and how successful this coup will prove.

One could see why Savills was tempted by the prospect of a purchase: Eastdil Secured has not only sold and financed some of the most valuable real estate transactions and properties in the U.S. since it grew as a division out of an investment bank in the late 1960s, it has also become a highly sought-after possession in its own right as a talent-heavy fierce competitor in the high-stakes game of commercial real estate advisory.

In 1999, Eastdil was sold to Wells Fargo. Two decades later, it was snapped up by Guggenheim Investments and Temasek Holdings. But since 2019, Eastdil has only gone from strength to strength. While always a force in investment sales and debt advisory, the firm now goes head to head with CRE’s heaviest hitters, including Newmark and Cushman & Wakefield. In 2024 alone, two of its star brokers, Will Silverman and Gary Phillips, racked up $4.4 billion in investment sales and led the charge in what became one of the hottest sales trends of the year: retail brands buying their real estate. 

When the transaction closes, Eastdil’s reach could further expand to new global markets that Savills has a foothold in — but Savills will be the one to get a major boost through new, heavy-hitting service lines in the U.S.

As part of the deal, Guggenheim Investments traded its 32 percent interest in Eastdil for a 5 percent interest in Savills, while Temasek Holdings got a 4 percent stake in Savills in return for its 25 percent ownership in March’s firm. Wells Fargo, which had a 3 percent interest in Eastdil, now has a 0.5 percent stake in Savills.

As for the high-ranking 85 employees at Eastdil who have equity in the firm (there’s a total headcount of about 650 globally), their stake in the company went from 39 percent to owning 6.3 percent of Savills. Former Eastdil employees who represented 1 percent of Eastdil’s ownership now own a 0.1 percent interest in Savills.

The Eastdil effect

Savills has much to gain from the transaction when it comes to business in New York City, which is firmly Eastdil’s turf.

“I think it doesn’t really change the competitive landscape at all [for Eastdil] because, at least from my vantage point in New York — and it’s a very myopically New York perspective — Savills really wasn’t active in capital markets in New York,” Bob Knakal, chairman and CEO of investment sales firm BK Real Estate Advisors, told Commercial Observer. “I think that the big question is how are they going to compensate the Eastdil folks? The Eastdil model is very nontraditional from a brokerage perspective, and it’ll be interesting to see how they compensate given that Savills is more of a traditional brokerage comp model.”

Eastdil brokers earn a salary and then share a bonus pool at the end of the year. But that less traditional pay model hasn’t hindered Eastdil’s success over the years, with superstar brokers like Phillips and Silverman handling major deals for CRE’s top-tier owners and investors.

And the firm’s success is coming from the top down. 

“I think that they have some incredibly talented people, namely Roy March, leading the firm, and Roy is an iconic titan within the industry,” Knakal said. “Many of his clients, if not all, probably would follow him wherever he goes.”

That competitive advantage is not lost on newly appointed Savills CEO Simon Shaw, who said as much in a fourth-quarter earnings report following the announcement.

“In Eastdil, we are buying the No. 1 player in the U.S. market,” Shaw said. “What this does is significantly enhance our position in the eyes of investors globally to whom the enlarged firm will provide a serious choice of a full-service advisory firm.”

Shaw had reached out to Eastdil about a possible acquisition more than a year ago after years of “trading blows” as competitors, mostly in European markets and California where there is overlap between the two firms. But, overall, the two firms have operated in such a way, geographically and within different sectors, that their joining will be more complementary than anything, he told CoStar.

In 2025 alone, Eastdil generated about $633 million in total revenue, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of about $113 million.

It’s not hard to find evidence of Eastdil’s more granular performance — and that could explain why Savills was so eager to acquire the company.

Within days of the acquisition’s announcement, Eastdil brokered a $530 million deal to sell the 1.2 million-square-foot shopping center in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., known as Victoria Gardens. Canada’s Brookfield Properties and Australia-based Queensland Investment Corporation sold the open-air retail hub to ​​Redwood West, Panattoni, Prime Finance and Prism Places in what was Southern California’s biggest retail deal since 2022.

On the East Coast in February, Eastdil’s Grant Frankel, Rob Turner and Ethan Pond helped negotiate a three-year commercial mortgage-backed securities loan of $450 million from Wells Fargo to help Eyal Ofer’s Global Holdings refinance 1250 Broadway.

Easdil is also marketing the sale of the iconic Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan for Dajia Insurance Group, which bought it for $1.95 billion in 2014 and invested in a $2 billion renovation. That renovation work closed the hotel’s operation for years, so it’s likely that China’s government-controlled insurance company is looking for every advantage in getting a return on its nearly $4 billion investment.

In October, Eastdil helped Scott Rechler’s RXR secure a $1.45 billion recapitalization of 1211 Avenue of the Americas from Apollo Global Management, of which $367 million in equity would pay for space improvements for vacant space as well as space that is leased to Fox News and other tenants.

Just a few months later, Sutton swung a deal with Prada, his longtime flagship tenant at 724 Fifth Avenue. The fashion brand paid $425 million, all-cash, for the Fifth Avenue building, and then bought nearby ​​720 Fifth Avenue plus an annex on East 56th Street for $410 million.

Weeks after that, Sutton fetched another $963 million from Gucci, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen parent company Kering for 715-717 Fifth Avenue. All told, it was $1.8 billion in real estate that Eastdil sold for Wharton Properties.

With all the magic that Eastdil can weave and the skill its teams bring to the table, the benefit for Savills is clear to see. But the transaction begs the question; What’s in it for Eastdil? 

According to one source, Guggenheim and Temasek wanted out, and Eastdil was forced to look for an entity to replace its investor base.

The firm “flirted” with a lot of companies before it settled on coming to an agreement with Savills, which suited Eastdil due to the lack of conflict between the two across service lines and geography, according to the source.

Eastdil denied the rumor that Guggenheim and Temasek wanted out, saying that the fact that the two investors are still involved with the business going forward — Savills — is proof of the opposite.

If Eastdil had been bought out by a brokerage like CBRE, the source continued, there would have been more disruption between the two companies. Such disruption would ultimately impact Eastdil’s structure, which acts on a more “harmonious system” that elevates its brokers through an overarching company strategy rather than one based on individual performance. 

“Eastdil does a really good job of making a C player appear to be a B-plus player based on their system and the perceived credibility of the firm,” the source said.

All shade aside, Eastdil will also get the benefit of differentiated revenue streams and better information through Savills’ leasing operations.

Whether Savills and Eastdil could hold one another back is another question, but Savills’ stock price has fallen 15.58 percent on the New York Stock Exchange in the last month. (Although external factors can’t be discounted — almost all of the market has had jitters over conflict in the Persian Gulf.)

Ides of March 

Eastdil’s history goes back to 1967 when it was founded by Benjamin Lambert, who died in 2021. Lambert is widely credited with weaving Wall Street investment banking aspects into commercial real estate deals with major transactions under his belt, like the sale of Chicago’s Willis Tower and New York City’s General Motors Building.

Through much of the 1980s, Lambert ran the company in a joint venture with Nomura Securities before reaching a deal to make it a subsidiary of Wells Fargo between 1999 and 2019.

Lambert, well into his 80s, led the majority buyout from Wells Fargo with Guggenheim Investments and Temasek.

March has been with Easdil almost as long as Lambert, joining the firm in 1978 and shifting his title from CEO to chairman with the Savills acquisition. (Eastdil’s current president, D. Michael Van Konynenburg, will become CEO in March’s place.)

At the time, March was an intern with an investment bank called Blyth Eastman Dillon, which happened to have a subsidiary known as Eastdil Realty. March got a permanent position in that division and hasn’t left, he told The Real Deal in 2017.

Twenty-five years later, he would help Lambert close on the $1.4 billion deal to sell the GM Building to Harry Macklowe, representing the seller, Conseco. 

In the interview, the usually private March laid bare some of the perceptions of him from other industry execs who see him as “eccentric.” He said some view him as a boot-wearing “freak” who has used an Eastdil beach bag as a briefcase for the last two or three decades. (Macklowe has been one such critic, saying as much in the book The Liar’s Ball.)

In 2019, when Wells Fargo sold its majority stake in the company to Guggenheim and Temasek, Eastdil’s future on the East Coast may have not been as sure-footed as its leadership would have wished, having lost its star brokers Douglas Harmon and Adam Spies in 2016 to Cushman & Wakefield.

In the wake of Harmon’s and Spies’s departures, Eastdil rolled with the punches by shifting David Lazarus, a senior managing director in the New York office, and Jeffrey Scott from Washington, D.C., to run its New York City brokerage services.

They managed to keep the big deals rolling in, securing a $1.2 billion deal on behalf of Walt Disney Company to sell its ABC campus — an assemblage of nine properties — on the Upper West Side to Silverstein Properties in July 2018.

The deal was a pretty safe investment for Silverstein, which ended up leasing the space back to Disney and ABC.

Around that time, Eastdil President Van Konynenburg considered the market as living in a Goldilocks zone, something that would continue if contemporary concerns about rising inflation and borrowing cost remained at bay. What would come at them over the next few years would dwarf those concerns.

COVID-19 hit New York in March 2020 and brought deals in commercial real estate almost to a standstill.

But Phillips and Silverman joined the team from Allianz Real Estate and Hodges Ward Elliott in 2019, and had time to study the market through the doldrums of the pandemic, readying their team for the ways they could transact when a better time came. Even though it was expanding into other markets like Miami when it signed an office lease at 1001 Brickell Bay Drive in 2022, this wait-and-see approach would last at least until 2023.

The clientele Phillips and Silverman were mainly working with in 2023 were high-net-worth and private buyers rather than institutional investors looking to buy at a price per square foot that was more reflective of a period maybe two decades ago. Since then, the Eastdil name has increasingly been associated with white-glove service and has become highly institutionalized. Phillips and Silverman consistently rank in the top 20 of Commercial Observer’s Power 100, and the firm’s debt team in Power Finance’s top 20. For good reason. 

Eastdil is a well-oiled machine that’s already running smoothly and efficiently. So will Savills grease its wheels or will a change of oil cause it to sputter? Time will tell. 

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.

Update: An earlier version of this story stated that Phillips and Silverman assisted Jeff Sutton in offloading 747 Madison Avenue to vacuum mogul James Dyson for $135 million. Eastdil was not involved in that particular deal.