James Nelson, A. Mitti Liebersohn and Arthur Mirante
Arthur Mirante, A. Mitti Liebersohn and James Nelson
Principal and Tri-State President; President and Managing Director of New York City Operations; Principal and Head of Tri-State Investment Sales at Avison Young
Last year's rank: 80
It’s a shame that last year seems like it was a decade ago, because 2019 was a banner year for the Avison Young tri-state investment sales team, headed by James Nelson. The group closed $525 million worth of transactions, up from $397 million the year before. A daisy chain of deals with Jan Hus Presbyterian Church, the Church of the Epiphany, and Weill Cornell Medical College involved more than $100 million of Upper East Side properties. December brought the closing of the sale of 250 Church, a 15-story office building that had been the headquarters of the City’s Human Resources Administration.
The COVID-19 crisis and resultant PAUSE order, however, made for a challenging first half of 2020. The firm laid off about a dozen staffers in its tri-state offices, and the executive team took pay cuts. “Our staff responded admirably and graciously,” Avison Young noted in a press release at the time.
And then adaptation began. “Although we began operating out of our homes in March, we never stopped working for our clients,” wrote Mitti Liebersohn, the president and managing director of NYC Operations, in an email to Commercial Observer. He noted that the brokerage “continued to negotiate leases, arrange sales, market properties and take on new assignments throughout the shutdown.”
From mid-March to the end of May, the firm negotiated nearly 225,000 square feet of office space. Notably, Tri-State President Arthur Mirante, Liebersohn and John Ryan represented landlord Kamber Management at Tower 45, in a 12-year, 77,000-square-foot early-renewal lease for hedge fund D.E. Shaw. The firm also arranged three leases, totaling more than 27,000 square feet, at 1501 Broadway, the Paramount Building. The law firm Goldberg, Miller & Rubin, P.C., took a six-year lease; the property manager Gumley-Haft took a seven-year lease, and the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service Inc. took a 15-year lease. “I am pleased to say,” Liebersohn noted, “that New York City and Avison Young are open for business.”—A.R.
