Scott Ansel.
Scott Ansel, 26
Associate director in office leasing at Savills
When Scott Ansel joined his boss, Evan Margolin, on a routine trip to visit a client in the Garment District, he had no idea it would end up turning into a year’s worth of deals.
The meeting was at the Textile Building at 295 Fifth Avenue, which, until recently, was home to more than 150 textile showrooms. The client said that the landlord was not honoring its renewal clause and, in fact, couldn’t be reached.
Ansel and another Savills colleague canvassed the building, talking to dozens of tenants, and learned that the property was being sold and the new owners planned to let the leases expire so they could reposition the property.
When the sale went through last October, Ansel’s team was able to get the exclusive on many of the tenants, most of whom knew each other and would need to relocate. A few deals have since closed and many are still in process. While COVID-19 has changed some of the calculus, most are still looking for new spaces in the Garment District, Ansel said.
“All jokes aside, I think I know more about the textile industry than anyone else on planet Earth right now,” he said. “I learned a whole new submarket. I’m usually focused on financial services, hedge funds, like high-end, cool office space. Now, it’s just a totally different realm because of one meeting that I went to with my boss.”
Prior to landing in the textile field, Ansel, who has worked at Savills for five years, dealt with technology, media and finance tenants like Winton Capital, Financial Technology Partners, Third Bridge and Twitch. In 2016, he was part of the team that helped Winton lease 30,500 square feet at 315 Park Avenue South. Later, when the company chose to refocus on its headquarters in London, Ansel represented Winton as it subleased its New York space to the game-streaming platform Twitch in April of this year.
To date, Ansel has completed more than 110 deals totaling approximately 650,000 square feet in transaction volume, according to Savills.
While Ansel has been busy since the COVID shutdowns were lifted, he acknowledged that it’s been an uncertain time for people in the office leasing business. “For several months of this year, I was like, is my job going to exist?”
As for the future of the city and how he can contribute to it, Ansel said: “I’m gonna vote.”
