James Nelson, A. Mitti Liebersohn and Arthur Mirante
Arthur Mirante, A. Mitti Liebersohn and James Nelson
Principal and Tri-State Chairman; 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
Arthur Mirante, Mitti Liebersohn and James Nelson have steered Avison Young through the last two years from a point where sales and lease deals were cut in half due to the pandemic.
The first quarter of 2021 turned out to be the nadir. The brokerage saw its lowest dollar sales volume since the financial crisis in 2009. By the end of the year, business had picked up considerably.
“Finally, after all the hard work we’ve been putting in, the market is behind us,” Nelson said. “One of the benefits of our capital markets group is that we’re one unified sales team. We cover the whole city — all asset classes. That allowed us to pivot.”
Avison Young went where the money was coming out of the health crisis, according to Nelson, such as going after the “white hot” industrial sector, cashing in on multifamily housing sales, and directing its efforts toward retail, despite a particularly uphill battle with COVID and e-commerce.
But the mounting challenges of the pandemic era were not only financial, but also indecisiveness and uncertainty from investors, according to Mirante.
“It’s a tough place to be making longterm decisions about real estate and you solve that with flexibility, by trying to give clients options to expand, to contract if you need to,” Mirante said. “We relocated Santander’s Midtown headquarters to 437 Madison Avenue. We did a lease with a lot of flexibility, and we did the deal with WeWork.”
A 32-year lease for Hospital for Special Surgery took 18 months to complete, which it only did recently, and what started as a midsized expansion of 50,000 square feet turned into one for 200,000, according to Mirante and Liebersohn. This deal would require Avison Young brokers wading into complicated territory with multiple interested parties, red tape and undeveloped space.
“People were really freaking out because nobody really knew what was going to happen coming out of COVID. We were really fortunate,” Liebersohn said. “We worked really hard and we were able to have a lot of success for the tenants that we work for and for the landlords.”
