Dale Braverman, 28

To be a broker is to react quickly, to hone and listen to one’s instincts, to have a competitive drive to close a deal and beat all challengers. Kind of like being a sportsman.

So, it’s not 100 percent surprising that Dale Braverman would have been a competitive skier growing up. He attended the Stratton Mountain School in Vermont and later the University of Colorado. (He also married another skier — their honeymoon in 2025 was spent skiing in France.) And, while he was never professional, his career in real estate as a debt broker has clearly benefited from this.

Braverman began at Cushman & Wakefield doing industrial leasing with a lean team in New York’s outer boroughs. (Real estate was in Braverman’s blood — his father is a real estate attorney, and his uncle is a developer.)

“It was a pretty gritty business,” Braverman said. “You were running around with smaller tenants, multiple clients. It was a wide range of personalities. You’d have the plumbing supply guy who owned his building for 50 or 60 years. But it taught me how to deal with different personalities on the debt side.”

Braverman closed more than 45 transactions — comprising some $110 million in real estate — but he was also earning a master’s degree at New York University’s Schack Institute in the financing, underwriting and capital markets side of real estate.

“One of my colleagues now — who grew up in the same town in Connecticut as me — said, ‘We’re looking for an analyst,’ ” Braverman said of his transition to the debt side of real estate. “And it happened to be at Cushman — so it was an easy transfer.”

For the last four years, Braverman has been a beast. He helped arrange $135 million in financing for 535 West 43rd Street; he arranged $255 million of financing for three industrial assets at the ELP55 industrial park in Wilmington, Ill. (the trickiest deal he said he’s closed, as it involved a $72 million refinancing, a $117 million build-to-suit construction loan and another $66 million construction loan); and Braverman’s team has been one of the 10 best-performing ones at Cushman & Wakefield’s capital markets division, with $10 billion in financings over the last four years.