Shimon Shkury

Ariel Property Advisors’ Shimon Shkury is generally a glass-half-full kind of guy who never sees a cloudy day in commercial real estate in New York. Instead, any cyclical downturns are merely opportunities to be seized. 

His Manhattan-based firm appears to have done just that, too. The dollar volume of its transactions increased to $945.1 million in 2022 from $867.6 million the year before.

Still, Shkury — a veteran broker, financial engineer and market researcher — said he has never seen a market more challenging.

“When you try to look at New York City’s real estate market today, you really have to uncover several different product types and what happened to them,” Shkury said. “We can’t look at everything with the same glasses. Everybody was affected by COVID, everybody is going to be affected by the interest rate environment, and different property types are going to be affected differently as we move along.”

This includes offices. 

“Pre-COVID, office had an oversupply in terms of the amount that was available, mostly in Manhattan,” Shkury said. “COVID changed the way tenants view office space and employers view office space. So the fundamentals of office changed not overnight, but very, very quickly. And the interest rates are definitely putting stress on the office market. Some office buildings are doing really well, like Class A ones that are fully tenanted. But there are others. … There’s definitely pain there, and we need to work through that pain.”

Shkury says Ariel is structured like an investment bank, meaning that it is organized into separate groups for investment sales, capital services and research. All three work together as one team, collaborating with the client, with the research group also capturing and sharing insights for external use.

In multifamily, Shkury said there’s opportunity depending on where in the market you focus. Affordable housing offers respectable returns, while rent-stabilized housing “has its challenges,” he said.

“The way I see our job is to supply clients with information, and make sure they have the ability to have options,” he said.