Shimon Shkury
President and founder at Ariel Property Advisors
Last year's rank: 81
Shimon Shkury has spent the better part of 2024 setting the stage for growth in a number of sectors throughout New York City, and the efforts appear to be paying off.
Ariel Property Advisors completed $454 million in transaction volume across 67 deals in 2024 alone.
“Last year, we’ve really continued to build on the platform that we’ve had powered by an incredible team,” Shkury said. “We went into the year with $100 million in contracts, specifically for affordable housing, and well over $3 billion in total sales over the past 10 years.”
For starters, Ariel formed a partnership with brokerage Global Real Estate Advisors (GREA) to play on one another’s investment sales strengths — and take Shkury’s firm national in the process — while also integrating artificial intelligence into day-to-day operations. It also expanded its market share in capital markets — especially the affordable housing, development and nonprofit sectors — and capital services.
“On the development sector, which is led by another partner, Sean Kelly, we’ve done about 17 deals in the last four, five months alone. That’s because the housing policy in New York City with the City of Yes is doing really well,” Shkury said. “So the investment sales side benefits from affordable housing developments, nonprofit transactions, the GREA partnership and then with capital services, which is what I think is our growth engine.”
The success has been building for a long time. Since Ariel started, they’ve closed on 340 affordable buildings with 18,000 units for $3.15 billion, and it’s currently marketing another 2,500 affordable units and has $100 million under contract. Some notable deals included the October 2024 sale of 1382-1386 Second Avenue in Lenox Hill for $25 million.
Ariel also arranged a $48 million sale of three affordable multifamily buildings in Central Harlem at 226 and 259 West 144th Street as well as 34 West 139th Street, plus a $26 million deal for a Bronx multifamily building with 237 units at 1500 Noble Avenue.
Shkury gives a lot of credit to his partners at the firm — the aforementioned Kelly, Victor Sozio, Michael Tortorici, Ivan Petrovic and Paul McCormick — for Ariel’s success.
