Emma Kistler, 25

“I knew I wanted to be in sales and wanted to be client facing,” Kistler explained. The Tulane University graduate set about the grueling task. But it was the kind of basic training that makes a solid soldier. And it probably didn’t hurt during the first frozen months of the pandemic, when the only thing a broker could do was the thankless work of calling landlords and tenants and trying to forge new relationships.

“I was fortunate to pick up the majority of the agency [assignments] that I have now during the pandemic,” Kistler said. “There was a lot of hand-holding, updating people on the market. It was certainly hard during the first half of the pandemic — but things started to pick up in 2021, and all of our hard work has come” to pay off.

Kistler began working with one of the more solid real estate buckets of the COVID-19 era: life sciences. Earlier this year she nailed a 48,000-square-foot deal for Opentrons open-source lab automation to take space at King Street Properties’ 45-18 Court Square, a 267,000-square-foot office and lab building in Long Island City, Queens.

But she also worked on plenty of non-life sciences deals: She secured a deal for Elegran Capital to sublease 27,404 square feet from GoDaddy at 1407 Broadway, and she got a 13,121-square-foot space for Crunch Fitness at 386 Park Avenue South. She even helped secure space for celebrity residential broker Ryan Serhant’s eponymous company.

Finally, Kistler made a major move during the pandemic, relocating to Newmark’s Denver office from Gotham.—M.G.