Bob Knakal
Bob Knakal
Chairman of New York Investment Sales at JLL
Last year's rank: 68
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, JLL’s Chairman of New York Investment Sales, Bob Knakal, has kept business moving by sticking to his discipline. In the process, he found he could not only maintain his traditional level of productivity, but eclipse it.
“My number one goal for decades has been to connect with 50 property owners on the phone every week,” Knakal said. “But since COVID, that average has been well into the seventies. It’s a blocking-and-tackling business. There’s no magic to it. It’s just having the discipline to make sure I get the calls done and do what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Knakal’s 2019 showed no shortage of productivity as he closed 23 transactions with a combined value of $1.15 billion, his eighth consecutive year above $1 billion.
His 2019 deals included $167 million for a building site of over 250,000 square feet at East 83rd Street and Third Avenue for two private families to the Naftali Group; $95 million for 331,000 square feet on the site of Brooklyn Hospital to the Rabsky Group, with Knakal representing the hospital; and $176.75 million for a two-part transaction, a 276,000-square-foot building site at 150 West 48th Street to Sam Chang and the adjacent Night Hotel to a confidential buyer in a separate transaction. Knakal represented the seller, The Rockefeller Group, for both.
“There was potential to sell the entire site to one developer, but it became apparent that the seller would do better selling the property in two parts,” said Knakal. “So we did a transaction for the Night Hotel separately, to a hotel operator who’s going to keep the hotel intact. Then we sold the land on 48th Street to a hotel developer who was going to build a new hotel there. That execution ended up being the best result for the client, and it was the first transaction I did with the JLL hotel team.”
As for getting through the rest of this crisis, Knakal sees hard work as the answer to surviving whatever follows.
“I lived through the [Savings & Loan] crisis in the early ‘90s, the recession in the early 2000s, and the Great Recession from 2007 to 2010,” he said. “During each of those periods, the field of brokers was whittled down significantly. I expect the same thing is happening now — maybe 20 or 30 percent of the brokers will just leave the business. So, I expect the field to be a little more concentrated, and that should lead to opportunities.”—L.G.
