Stephen Siegel and Scott Gottlieb

“2024 was amazing,” declared Stephen Siegel. “2025 is already more amazing.”

Indeed, when you’ve done “almost 70 transactions on the agency and the tenant side,” as CBRE’s Siegel and Scott Gottlieb completed last year, you’d feel good, too.

Among the highlights were multiple transactions for the State of New York; a 207,000-square-foot lease for MLB Network in Elmwood Park, N.J.; and Apple’s 61,000-square-foot expansion into Macy’s old space at Penn 11 to bring the tech company’s total footprint to a whopping 460,000 square feet.

On the landlord side, Siegel and Gottlieb represented State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio when LVMH decided to take 150,000 square feet at 590 Madison Avenue. They are also involved in leasing a 650,000-square-foot San Jose campus that Yahoo is subleasing to TikTok parent company ByteDance.

And that was just 2024. We’re only four-and-a-half months into 2025, and Siegel and Gottlieb have already nailed a 100,000-square-foot deal for Apollo Global Management (also at 590 Madison Avenue) and a massive 336,000-square-foot deal to put Universal Music Group in Vornado Realty Trust’s Penn 2. They are also putting the finishing touches on a deal to bring government offices to 919 Third Avenue — Siegel and Gottlieb already put Gov. Kathy Hochul in a 54,000-square-foot office at the same address late last year.

As for worries about possible stumbles in the office market? CBRE’s Chairman and CEO Bob Sulentic sounded realistic about the possible impact of higher tariffs during CBRE’s earnings call last month, but also boasted that the firm had been off to an extremely strong start with $8.9 billion in revenue across the brokerage — which was 12 percent higher than the previous quarter. That kind of story seems to be borne out by Siegel and Gottlieb.

“I’m just going on what’s already done and close to done,” said Siegel. 

By that metric, they’re golden.