Kim Levandovsky, 29
Director at MONA Retail Holdings
Kim Levandovsky found his way into commercial brokerage from entrepreneurial origins. He founded a financial services and debt collection company when he was still a student at Brooklyn College, and discovered that he excelled as a mediator between overleveraged businesses and their lenders. His company had about 30 employees when the pandemic hit.
“I always wanted to go into commercial real estate,” Levandovsky said. So he started planning his pivot.
Around that time, Levandovsky crossed paths with Brandon Singer, who recruited him to join the brokerage team at his nascent retail leasing and advisory firm, MONA. “Everyone was telling me, ‘Kim, you’re crazy for going into a business at a time when no one knows what tomorrow will bring,’ ” Levandovsky said. “But I’m a big believer in when people are going left, to go right.” Three years later, MONA has become a top player in retail leasing in New York, and Levandovsky said the company is light-years ahead of where he imagined it would be.
Levandovsky helped clients ink some 20 lease deals in his first two years, and has since been promoted to director on MONA’s brokerage team. He represented ownership in the relocation of blue-chip art gallery Venus Over Manhattan to 39 Great Jones Street in NoHo last year, and helped secure the Upper East Side flagship for Coolspa at RFR Holding’s 50 East 61st Street. He said lately he’s been laser-focused on helping lease the Meatpacking portfolio of the William Gottlieb estate.
MONA has made a name for itself helping tenants and landlords rechart the path through the evolving retail sector in New York and Miami. Levandovsky said he splits his work evenly between tenants and landlords, including William Gottlieb Estate, RFR and Weinberg Properties. “There’s a couple of other things that we do that’s a little bit different than others,” Levandovsky said. He said a focus on providing landlords with data is part of the strategy, but kept the details secret.
“No deal is too small, and no deal is too big,” he said. “We like to follow an institutional process, but we are still super boutique so we can quickly adapt to a certain environment.”
