Lyle Stern.
Lyle Stern
Co-founder at Vertical Real Estate
The breakup last February of one of Miami’s most successful retail brokerages, the Koniver Stern Group, shocked the city’s retail world. Co-founder Lyle Stern described the dissolution as completely amicable. In its wake, Stern teamed up with former Koniver Stern brokers Michael Sullivan and Noah Fox to launch Vertical Real Estate out of a South Beach office space.
“It’s been great for several reasons,” Stern said about his new shop. “I have great partners, as I did in the past, and we’re in a very robust market. We got a great group of tenants; most of them we worked with for many years, and that makes it exciting.”
Past and present tenants include Carbone, Sweetgreen, Whole Foods, KITH and West Elm, plus Vertical recently secured Danny Meyer’s Daily Provisions as a client in Miami.
It’s not just potential deals that has Stern optimistic about Vertical. Since launching the company, Stern represented landlord CP Group in a 10,000-square-foot deal at Citigroup Center to bring Canadian restaurant chain Cactus Club Cafe to Florida for the first time. Vertical also represented Swiss watch shop Audemars Piguet — with Jonathan Schley of CBRE — in its 11,591-square-foot office lease at Eighteen Sunset in Miami Beach.
It might seem odd that a retail broker worked on an office lease, but Stern said it happened largely thanks to the “relationships” and trust he built with retailers in his 30-plus-year career, which he hopes to continue to do at Vertical.
Stern said the firm’s growth plan is about “constant communication” with landlords and tenants, with regular travel around the country to meet new ones, and hosting dinners and cocktail parties to bring his clients together. And Vertical — which launched with seven brokers — is focusing more on a quality-over-quantity strategy and isn’t trying to ramp up its team too quickly.
“We don’t have an expansion goal as much as we have a quality growth goal,” Stern said. “It’s not about adding bodies to have a bigger team. It’s really what’s intelligent growth for us.”
