Justin Ryan Arzi, 28
Vice president at CBRE
Justin Ryan Arzi can honestly say one of his clients is vacuuming up space.
In March of this year, Weybourne Holdings — the British-based family office of the vacuum cleaner mogul Sir James Dyson — plunked down $60 million for 155 Mercer Street from Thor Equities and ASB in an off-market sale. Arzi, Doug Middleton and Dan Kaplan arranged the sale so that Weybourne could establish a flagship retail and office presence in New York. It was Weybourne’s first building buy in the United States.
“They were really interested in SoHo,” Arzi said. “And they were interested in the market perception. … They’re a consumer-facing technology brand so being alongside companies like Apple was important from a brand positioning.”
SoHo was the site of another impressive deal that Arzi has been involved with since joining CBRE in 2017 out of Tulane University: the sale of the Louis Vuitton store at 106 Prince Street along with three contiguous residential condos for $82.5 million to the Irish investor Aidan Brooks and a Luxembourg-based holding company with ties to Brooks.
But, yes, beyond the glam of SoHo, Arzi — who has been involved in $1 billion worth of transactions across almost every asset class — has also done deals in the outer boroughs and during less-than-ideal times. That has included 2501 Queens Plaza North, 260,000 square feet of buildable land next to the Queensboro Plaza train station in Long Island City that a local Queens family put on the market in the dead summer of 2020.
“People thought we were crazy to bring out a development then,” said Arzi, referring to the depths of the pandemic in New York City.
But, after the North Carolina-based Grubb Properties plunked down $63 million, who’s crazy now?
