James Ege, 36

James Ege enjoys helping industrial businesses find warehouse space in a city with rising land costs and shrinking manufacturing zones.  

“We meet a lot of characters with a lot of different personalities,” he said. “It’s plumbers, auto guys, guys in waste and creative types, whether it’s studio people or lighting companies. It’s all walks of life, really.”  

The Long Island native took an internship at Pinnacle Realty of New York the summer after graduating from Baruch College in 2013, after a childhood friend introduced him to the brokerage. He went door to door with flyers in heavily developed but sparsely populated swaths of Long Island City, Astoria and Maspeth, Queens, to see if anyone was looking for space or moving out of their property.

“It wasn’t always very welcoming, but sometimes people would give you good information, and we would bring it back to the guys and see how that process worked,” he said.

Ege got his real estate license later that year, and has since focused on northern Queens, which contains a diverse mix of industrial tenants, logistics centers and production studios.

Last year, he leased a 30,000-square-foot warehouse and 20,000 square feet of land at 20-27 119th Street in College Point to a cabinet company. More recently, Ege worked on two deals in Long Island City on 47th Avenue, leasing 32,000 square feet of space to a moving company and a 16,000-square-foot industrial loft to a machine shop.  

But his largest deal remains a $11.5 million transaction for a 29,250-square-foot warehouse at 31-31 48th Avenue in Long Island City, which was split into seven units for multiple tenants.

Even though land in the five boroughs is getting pricer, Ege has noticed increased demand for small and medium-size industrial properties for a wide range of businesses. 

“Logistics centers went super crazy during COVID, but there’s a longer shelf life for the bigger buildings,” he said. “If you have 5,000 or 10,000 square feet, it’s a bigger pool of companies that can lease those than if you have 60,000 square feet. Companies that can afford to be here have a lot to look at, and it’s expensive.”