Press

BKREA announces Genessy Jaramillo has joined the firm as a Land Sales Specialist in Manhattan, working alongside Chairman & CEO Bob Knakal. With a strong background in real estate and a commitment to client success, Genessy brings both experience and innovation to BKREA’s growing team.

Bob Knakal creator of the Knakal Map Room and BKREA a real estate investment property brokerage firm in NYC is transforming the way CRE brokerages produce with industry changing ai and data strategies.

Bob Knakal’s new brokerage firm, BKREA, is off to a remarkable start, closing $51 million in deals, securing a $52 million development site under contract, and being retained to sell 20 properties worth $1.2 billion in just six months.

Bob Knakal and the BKREA team successfully completed the $27 million sale of a 10-story office building at 37 East 18th Street in NYC's Flatiron District. The historic property offers significant lease-up potential and user-occupancy opportunities in a prime Manhattan submarket near Union Square.

Zar Property NY has purchased a 67,051-square-foot office building a block north of Union Square for $27 million, according to city records made public Friday.

In 2006, the hulking office building at 135 West 50th Street in midtown Manhattan sold for US$332 million. Tenants occupied nearly every floor; offices were in demand; real estate was booming.

The sale price of 135 West 50th Street in Midtown, which is only 35 percent full, was a sign of how much the pandemic upended the market for office buildings in New York City.

As someone who strongly believes “it’s not who you know, but who knows you”, being in the NYREJ 540 times means that we were working on our market presence and NYREJ helped us get the word out about what we were doing and how we were doing it. Being in the NYREJ has always been a priority for us given the reach the publication has. More broadly, NYREJ has been helpful to the industry as it is another place to go for market information and exposure for the movers and shakers in the commercial real estate business in our market.

Knakal is celebrating his 40th year anniversary being an investment sales broker in the New York City commercial real estate market. As of last week, Bob has brokered the sale of 2,339 properties in New York which is generally considered to be the highest total for any individual broker in the United States.

Bob Knakal, a real estate broker credited with selling the most commercial buildings of any single agent in New York City, is now expanding his road map in search of further success.

Bob Knakal celebrates 40 years in NYC commercial real estate, having brokered 2,339 property sales totaling over $22 billion. Commercial Lending News features an exclusive interview discussing his career achievements, innovative approaches, and future outlook.

Composed largely of high-net-worth individuals and private family offices — typically boasting fortunes of $150 million (on the low end) and $150 billion or so (on the highest of the high end) — this class of the rich, very rich and super rich has expanded its membership over the last 20 years and has now emerged as a new league of shadow players in the debt and equity markets of commercial real estate.

The Dursts are looking to sell their large development site in East Harlem after the state hammered out a replacement for 421a.

The investment sales market in New York City is in unprecedented circumstances. During each of the past major corrections — savings & loan crisis in the early 1990s, the recession in the early 2000s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 and the “long slide” from 2016 through 2021 — every product type was losing value, just to varying degrees.