Jeffrey and Brian Feil

Now is not the time for amateurs.

In a year of leasing challenges, father-and-son team Jeffrey and Brian Feil have stepped up in the marketplace. Despite the real estate industry’s soliloquies of office and retail deaths, the Feil Organization’s diverse portfolio runs the gamut. It includes shopping centers, high street retail, enclosed malls and both high-rise luxury apartments and apartment complexes. If you keep up with a building and take care of it, it will take care of you, said Jeffrey Feil. 

“Everyone’s saying that leasing is dead, or office is dead,” said his son Brian Feil. “We don’t see it that way based on the activity we have had in our portfolio throughout the year.”

While the younger Feil rejects the latest mantras, he stands by real estate’s tried-and-true pillar for adding value to a portfolio: “Location matters,” he said, highlighting the importance of buying in the right spot. “Some of the side street buildings — doesn’t matter how well the building is maintained, you’re just not leasing.”

Take the Archdiocese of New York’s office consolidation into 142,308 square feet at 488 Madison Avenue, which closed in January 2024. Feil worked on the deal for a year, but, while the location may have enticed the tenant, it was Feil’s capital and ability to transact that cinched the lease. 

Feil’s other major recent deals include leases signed at 841 Broadway and 853 Broadway. Once you start building momentum in leasing a building, that momentum continues to build, said Brian Feil. That’s not to say everything has been perfect, he said, “but 95 percent of our portfolio, we’ve been able to meet the market with capital, and the brokers know it.”. 

As for how Feil operates in-house? “A father-son combo — it’s not for the weak of heart,” joked Jeffrey Feil. “Eventually, we’ll figure it out.”