James Nelson
Principal and head of tri-state investment sales at Avison Young
Last year's rank: 79
With more than 5,000 real estate professionals in more than 100 offices in 17 countries, there’s no way you would call Avison Young a small business. But in New York, where commercial property brokerages jostle for a slice of the Big Apple, Avison Young — which does a lot of business on the West Coast — is sometimes overlooked in a city with a CBRE, a Cushman & Wakefield, a JLL, a Newmark and a Colliers.
For James Nelson, that means plying the block-by-block strategy he honed as a star broker at the former Massey Knakal, where he was a top lieutenant to Paul Massey and Robert Knakal. They revolutionized the trade by splitting New York, including the outer boroughs, into neighborhoods and assigning sections to brokers, so each became an expert on his or her assigned section.
These days, Nelson’s territory is much wider than it was at Massey Knakal. As head of tri-state investment sales for Avison, he oversees commercial property sales covering the entire New York area. He has left Massey Knakal’s territorial assignment philosophy behind. “We want to be more selective with the type of assignments,” he said. “We’ve been very active in SoHo, the East Village.”
That sometimes means brokering some of the city’s larger and more glamorous properties, like 250 Church Street, a $200 million-
plus transaction in Manhattan’s Tribeca.
“I wouldn’t say we’re active in the trophy space, but we are certainly in the upper middle market,” Nelson said. “A lot of our activity is being able to identify high-net-worth [investors], foreign buyers. We just sold the corner of 486 Broadway, on the corner of Broome, and we found a Swiss buyer, who paid all equity. That was not a trophy, but a prime corner in SoHo.”
But this is a different market, one where rising rents are not a given, where companies are rethinking just who comes to the office and how often, where interest rates are making buying and fixing up properties more challenging. Nonetheless, Avison Young keeps busy, Nelson said.
“What we are more focused on today are buyers who don’t have to rely on financing,” he said. “Working with all-equity buyers, 1031 buyers [a reference to a tax clause that allows buyers a break if they use sales proceeds for another purchase] and cash. And also looking to get creative, with seller financing — whatever it takes.”
