Bob Knakal

Bob Knakal’s BKREA marked its second anniversary in early April, and it has much to celebrate.

Knakal’s investment sales firm, launched on the heels of his exodus from JLL, has closed 43 transactions totaling $1.78 billion in Manhattan real estate. As it makes its way through 2026, the firm has at least 75 listings that have the potential to bring in about $4 billion for his clients, according to Knakal.

Knakal’s signature marketing device has been a very visual representation — 24 feet long and 10 feet wide — showing most of Manhattan. The map takes up a huge section of his Midtown office.

“The reason we had such a good year last year is the efficacy of the Knakal map room,” Knakal said. “That development site map I have is by far and away the best marketing tool that I’ve ever created. We have every site that is under construction, every site that’s been demolished, every potential development site and potential assemblage site. … When someone comes into the office and they see that …”

The markets master also touts the Knakal Land Index, a database of every land sale in Manhattan south of 96th Street since 1984, giving the firm an immense array of data across 2,400 transactions separated by residential rental, residential condominium, hotel, office and a miscellaneous category.

Knakal, who says he isn’t much of a tech bro, made an artificial intelligence expert one of his first hires upon launching the firm. BKREA now uses proprietary machine-learning technology to best leverage all this data.

“It’s giving us all kinds of crazy insight into the market, like the fact that a corner development site will sell for a 24.4 percent premium above what a mid-block development site sells for,” Knakal said. “We have 200 nuggets of insight that have come out of the AI models that we’ve applied to these datasets that is giving us, really, the combination of the historical trends and then looking at the supply pipeline to figure out what the competitive set is going to look like for any particular site.”

This approach has given Knakal confidence that his firm provides something the competition does not.