Andrew Cohen, 28

“I was ‘eat, sleep and breathe’ commercial real estate from the time I was little, through my father,” Andrew Cohen said when told he had made this list. (His dad is Ken Cohen, a finance executive at Bank of America and a regular honoree on Commercial Observer’s Power Finance list.) “So it’s nice to be recognized on my own.”

Well, that can happen when you work on the nation’s largest office-to-residential conversion.

The conversion of the erstwhile Pfizer HQ in Midtown Manhattan will result in some 1,600 new multifamily units, totaling 1.2 million gross square feet, 950,000 net residential rentable square feet, and 100,000 square feet of amenities.

The road to that started in August 2023. That’s when Cohen joined IPA, a subsidiary of brokerage giant Marcus & Millichap, to support Max Herzog and Marko Kazanjian as they expanded the firm’s capital markets platform. A year later, the team arranged the financing for the acquisition of the two 42nd Street properties that Pfizer had leased from 1968 to 2022.

The development of the parcels is complex, involving shaving off the top of the existing building at 219 East 42nd Street to reinforce a podium that will be topped with a 20-story tower, as well as adding another four stories of amenities at 235 East 42nd. Hence the need for $720 million in proceeds, the largest construction loan in Manhattan so far in 2025 (it closed in May). 

Cohen — involved in executing, underwriting and deal placement of the construction loan — notes that the transaction drew “multiple backup offers at ask, testimony to our team knowing who the players are in the space today.”

In addition to his deal responsibilities, Cohen, a George Washington University graduate who lives in a FiDi office-to-residential conversion himself, is also in charge of the expanding team’s analyst pool. “I was yelled at as an analyst,” he recalls. “Now I rule with a stern but fair fist.”