Knakal, The Return

After selling Massey Knakal to Cushman & Wakefield in December of 2014 for $100 million, our integration into C&W was relatively seamless.

We stayed in our space at 275 Madison Avenue in Manhattan and the Brooklyn and Queens offices stayed in place as well. Other than different business cards and changing the logo on our setups and marketing materials, not much changed. Once a month, someone from HQ would come over to say hello and that was about it.

It was going to be a beautiful 5 years, until it wasn’t.

In October of 2016, C&W made a deal with the NYC Eastdil investment sales team which was a breach of our contracts. We reduced our term to 3.5 years, got a couple of more bucks, and some additional support in order to stick around. They wanted us to stay until the company went public.

As my contract was nearing its end in early June of 2018, they made me a surreal offer late one morning on a Friday: $5 million in soon-to-be-issued C&W stock or $5 million in cash to stay for 3 more years…or be fired. I was given only a few hours to make my decision.

I asked if I could have the weekend to make my decision as I wanted to talk it over with my wife. I was told I could talk to whomever I wanted but had to make a decision by 5 pm that day. I didn’t respond by 5 pm and shortly thereafter my phone started blowing up. I found out they weren’t kidding by reading an article in @trdny  which was planted by the company just after the 5 pm deadline.

If I were running C&W, I would have made the Eastdil deal also. It was the right thing to do, but to not be able to figure out how to integrate the platform that by far sold more buildings every year than any other firm (Massey Knakal) and the platform that by far sold the highest dollar volume of sales every year (the Eastdil team) was a total FUBAR.

I spent the summer negotiating to find a new home.

In September of 2018, I made the decision, along with 53 of my friends from C&W, all of whom had been with me at Massey Knakal, to join JLL. That’s another story for another day but in September of 2018, the @commobserver did a great cover story on our move to JLL.

Here is the cover of the magazine.