Bobby Carrozzo, 28

Carrozzo wasn’t from one of the clans that dominate the Midtown office skyline or have virtual cities named after them in Queens, but his great-grandfather owned several industrial warehouses in Astoria. When he was 13 or 14 years old, and his grandmother was renting out these spaces to the plumbers and other operators still in the neighborhood, “she would need help and she would say, ‘Can you help me type up the rider?’ ”

We imagine that had some small effect on Carrozzo’s future.
When he arrived at Cornell University, “I knew I wanted to go into the business world in some capacity,” Carrozzo said, and he was interested in the tangibility of brick and mortar and that “if you put X amount of dollars [in], how much can you sell a building for? How much is it worth? And I wondered how I could learn this.”

It was only logical that he should find his way into the Cushman & Wakefield PREP program and onto a career in Manhattan.

COVID-19 “was really the first time we had to deal with something like that,” Carrozzo said. “For me, I was really looking toward getting as much information as we could. We wanted to be an adviser for clients more than ever. … I really wanted to know from people who [had been through] the savings and loan crisis, the Great Financial Crisis and take their experience.”

Coming out of the pandemic, Carrozzo and his team have been on a selling spree. “Our team has done about $200 million in transactions,” he said, “and multifamily has been the driver.”

Carrozzo’s team — which also consists of Robert Burton and Michael Gimbecki — sold an apartment building at 105 West 55th Street for $32 million (“We ended up getting something like 40 bids”); a six-story, 33-unit building at 35 Bedford Street for $31 million; a corner property at 203 Spring Street that was originally a co-op for $20 million; and 19 Prince Street for $8.5 million.

Carrozzo recently got engaged to Sarah Frick, a senior consultant at an HR company, and they live in Hoboken. “We talk about real estate nonstop,” Carrozzo said. “We were touring a property recently and the broker said [to Frick], ‘Are you in real estate, too?’ ”

She’ll soon be able to say: “It runs in the family.” —M.G.