Real Estate Forum - October 2013

down more rapidly than in the
last business cycle.” As a result,
clients are looking for a real
estate solutions partner with
hands-on involvement by senior
people who will “help you navi-
gate around the industry’s ice-
bergs that tend to pop up in an
uncertain environment.”
That level of involvement by
the senior principals at AY
encourages clients to seek them
out for long-term solutions, he
adds.

The hiring of Mirante, a four-decade veteran of Cushman & Wakefield who arranged the sales of 200 Park Ave. and 666 Fifth Ave.—each for more than $1.5 billion—is an especially telling illustration of the firm’s attraction to both clients and industry talent. “I was very attracted to the partnership culture,” Mirante tells Forum. “I was very attracted to the mission statement” which he found strikingly reminiscent of one he’d helped draft for C&W 30 years earlier.

Last but not least, Mirante says, he relished “the opportunity
to build something from scratch. So I wasn’t going to be com-
ing into a situation where we would have to eliminate people
who either weren’t doing well or who didn’t ‘fit’ in my judg-
ment. Instead, I was going to have an opportunity to bring
people here who wanted to collaborate and wanted that to be
their business model, people who were committed to succeed-
ing and doing better.”
Partly on the strength of some “very experienced profession-
als” among the New York office’s early hires as principals—
such as John Ryan III from JLL and Martin Conningham from
Grubb—“we got some very interesting reactions” when talking
up the new operation, Mirante recalls. The combination of
AY’s newness to the market coupled with the professionals’
longtime presence there provoked one such positive response.
“And another reaction was, ‘you know, we could use a new
player in this marketplace.’ That shocked me because although
we have so many good commercial real estate service providers
and brokers in New York City, here was a sophisticated client
saying we could use a breath of fresh air and a new way of
doing things.”
Accordingly, Mirante says, the reception among would-be
clients “wasn’t ‘come back in two years when you’re double the
size.’ It was ‘tell me your story.’ And in many cases, clients were
very receptive. They’ve demonstrated that receptivity by giving
us some pretty meaningful assignments.”
These have included the pre-leasing assignment for the
Moinian Group’s planned office tower at 3 Hudson Boulevard
on Manhattan’s Far West Side, the repositioning of the
800,000-square-foot 1501 Broadway and the management of
Winthrop Hospital’s considerable real estate assets on Long
Island.

“No piece of business, no client opportunity for us these
days, is insignificant,” Mirante says. “We have to earn our
stripes in this very competitive marketplace client by client,
and by producing results one by one. The big shops can afford
to lose a deal now and then; we cannot.”
That sense of making each assignment count is one of the
aspects of AY’s work ethic that most impresses David Atencio,
the Englewood, CO-based director of global transaction man-
agement for Western Union. On the real estate assignments
that AY handles for the multinational firm, “The company
doesn’t transfer our portfolio and our projects to a junior-level
associate,” he says. “Our projects are managed by senior-level
employees, who give it the time and attention that I expect.”
Past that, Atencio continues, “It’s a solid real estate partner in
all of our strategic transactions,” with a strong attention to
detail.

Along with building individual markets and cultivating cli-
ent relationships, AY is also filling out service lines. On the
capital markets side, Amy Erixon, whose three-decade career
includes 12 years as international director with LaSalle
Investment Management, joined AY in 2010 as principal and
managing director to develop a cross-border program, “to pro-
vide for our established Canadian clients access to investment
opportunities that they can’t get at home.”
Its first product in this arena was a US apartment fund, so
chosen both because of multifamily’s resilience in this country
and because Canadians see few opportunities to buy assets in
this property class. “In Canada, they trade very infrequently,
the units themselves tend to be much older and there’s also
rent control in most of the major markets in Canada,” Erixon
explains. “So the opportunity to get into new, state-of-the-art
multifamily units in growing areas of the United States, at
below replacement cost, was very attractive to our institutional
clients in Canada.”
Since then, AY has added a few separate accounts for those
Canadian institutions who want to invest in the US and in
Europe directly as opposed to participating in a fund. “That is
particularly attractive to the midsized plans that already have a
very robust Canadian property portfolio, and are looking at
the US and other developed markets to augment that,” says