Will Silverman and Gary Phillips

The investment sales market might be slowing down this year, but clearly no one told the folks at Eastdil Secured.

In 2022, Eastdil closed over $4 billion worth of transactions in its New York office, and the firm has $1 billion currently awarded or under contract. And the deals Eastdil has closed represented some of the largest transactions in New York City history, said managing directors Will Silverman and Gary Phillips.

The duo brokered Silverstein Properties and Seven Valleys’ sale of the final portion of the former ABC campus on the Upper West Side to Extell Development for around $930 million, and Blackstone’s acquisition of 8 Spruce Street for $930 million — the largest single-building multifamily sale ever, according to Phillips. Both deals closed last year. 

To get the ABC campus sale done, Silverman and Phillips built a map of every single block around Central Park and figured out which ones could be assembled into a campus as large as the group of buildings on Columbus Avenue between West 66th and West 67th streets. 

“Lo and behold, we discovered, based on existing co-ops, existing condos and landmarking, that if you didn’t do this one, the chances that an opportunity of this scale was ever going to arise again were slim to none,” Silverman said. “The scale of the opportunity made it both challenging and also made it interesting.”

But that’s not all.

Phillips and Silverstein brokered Blackstone and RXR’s joint $325 million sale of 1330 Avenue of the Americas and Stonehenge NYC’s $115 million purchase of an Upper East Side apartment building dubbed RiverEast. They put into contract a $180 million deal for Silverstein Properties and Metro Loft to buy 55 Broad Street. Phillips even had his hand in a $435 million refinancing of a new industrial development in Long Island City, Queens. 

Eastdil Secured landed 17 first-round bids for its RiverEast sale, and Phillips expects to keep churning out multifamily sales through 2023, despite a slowdown in the market. 

“There’s still a belief in the long-term viability of New York multifamily,” Phillips said. “One of the largest landlords here is a good client of ours. He always describes owning New York multifamily as like owning Treasuries with upside, because it’s such a safe investment and you have tons of upside.”