Bob 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.
Those sales total over $22 billion.
For 26 of these 40 years, he owned and ran Massey Knakal Realty Services, a NYC brokerage that he sold to Cushman and Wakefield in 2014 for $100 million.
From 2001 to 2014, according to CoStar, the number two company in NYC sold about 1,300 properties, while Massey Knakal sold over 4,000, lapping the field, including all of the big national and global real estate firms by more than 3 times.
He is the leading commercial real estate influencer on social media ranking #1 on LinkedIn and #2 on X (Twitter). Thousands of his followers on social media refer to him as the GOAT, the Greatest Of All-Time, when it comes to commercial sales brokers. To view Bob’s portfolio of 100s of completed NYC real estate deals, visit bobknakal.com.
Investor and developer Robert Lobel said, “When you take into consideration his entire body of work, the successes he has achieved and the many that he has trained and inspired, it’s hard to make an argument against that title of GOAT that so many market participants throw around about him. There truly is no one like him. There is Bob Knakal and then there is everyone else!”
This month, USCommercialLending.com sits down with legendary broker Bob Knakal to talk about his career, his observations and his outlook on the commercial real estate market as he celebrates his 40th anniversary selling buildings in The Big Apple.
USCL: Bob, congratulations on your 40th anniversary. After the extraordinary success you’ve had you could easily be sitting on the beach drinking pina coladas. What keeps you going?
BK: Well, first, I will say thanks for doing this interview with me. I am very proud to be celebrating the 40th anniversary in this business and feel like I may have another good 20 or 30 years in me! God has blessed me with good health and a lot of energy, and I still love the business as much today as I did when I started. Selling buildings is my career and also my hobby – how lucky am I?
Second, I am addicted to the many positive rushes this business gives you. Today, they refer to the dopamine rush that folks get from being on their cell phones or surfing the internet. I get that rush when achieving those “wins” brokering and there are plenty of opportunities to win in commercial sales brokerage. You get that feeling when the client tells you they are interested in selling, when you give a great pitch, when the client tells you they are going to hire you to sell the property, when you achieve a meeting of the minds when negotiating, when the sale contract is signed, when the transaction finally closes and when the client lets you know that they appreciate a job well done. That’s a lot of winning just for just one deal. I am addicted to those moments.
USCL: So, you recently decided to open your own brokerage shop again. That’s a lot to undertake at 62 years old. Most folks are thinking about retirement at that age.
BK: Retirement is not in my vocabulary. Let’s face it, I’m not doing manual labor here. If I can speak and think, I can do this. It’s fun to speak to such an eclectic group of people every day. Real estate owners, investors and developers are quite a bunch of characters, and everyone is different. One minute I might be speaking to my good friend, Steve Roth, Chairman of VNO, a public REIT and the next conversation might be with the proverbial “little old lady,” whose family purchased the asset a hundred years ago. I love that!
And I also don’t think I’m such a great employee. I have been fired from my last two jobs (at C&W and JLL – he served as Chairman of New York Investment Sales at each) and figured if I worked for myself, my job security would be a bit better. But seriously, I see an opportunity today. It’s the same type of opportunity Paul (Massey) and I saw in the late 1980s – an opportunity to do something very new and different and that is really exciting. We are using these fabulous data sets we have and applying modern technology in a number of ways. It’s very cool stuff.
USCL: How are you using technology today to gain an advantage and how long have you been tech savvy?
BK: Oh, I am not tech savvy at all. I am happy I can get my cell phone on every morning. I have great people around me to make the tech stuff work. My perspective and thoughts on tech are very clear though.
I’ll take you back to 1984 when I started. I had no computer on my desk, no fax machine and no cell phone. We carried around rolls of quarters to make calls from pay phones on the corner when we were out in the field.
Today, 40 years later, the world has changed so profoundly. But I believe the world is going to change to an even greater extent over the next five years because of AI.
And we are using AI in three main ways: first, to make prospecting more efficient and effective; second, to make transaction execution more efficient and effective, and third, with respect to data interpretation. This third bucket has the greatest potential for the industry but is going to be the toughest to implement given the poor data sets that exist.
USCL: Your Knakal Map Room is the talk of the industry. Can you explain what that is and how it came about?
BK: The Knakal Map Room is a room that contains more information about the land market in Manhattan than exists anywhere else in the world.
Given a long-term frustration I had with the lack of information available about the development pipeline and the need for that information to most accurately value land, I have wanted for many years to go out into the field, walk the streets and count all of the buildings under construction.
The pandemic was the perfect time to do it. The streets were empty. The stores were closed. The city was a ghost town.
I spent 220 hours in the streets highlighting every site that had been demolished, every building under construction, every potential development site and every assemblage site. That field work was followed up with thousands of research hours and the resulting map is an incredible 24’ long, 10’ wide masterpiece of what the land market is all about in Manhattan.
We are currently creating Map Rooms for Northern Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
We are mining information the old-fashioned way then using AI to supercharge our insights. These will provide our clients with the ability to make the best, most informed decisions possible and will lead to them achieving better outcomes. At the end of the day, that’s what it is all about – helping clients achieve better results!
USCL: We know you are a big sports fan, and your baseball business card has gone viral on social media. How did you come up with the idea for the baseball business card?
BK: As a kid, I collected baseball cards and always had a fascination with statistics. I was one of the few who spent more time looking at the backs of the cards than the fronts. So, when I bumped into a client I have known for decades, about 4 years after I had arrived at JLL and he thought I was still at Cushman, I needed to figure out a way to impress upon him where I was. I decided to do a lifetime baseball card and send it to him with a JLL hat on and a big JLL on the front. I was just going to send one to this particular client but the guys at the office loved it and encouraged me to make many of them. They loved it but JLL hated it. Probably one of the reasons they fired me. Everyone else seems to love it. I have autographed over 25,000 of them at this point and am now on the third version of the card – the new one has BKREA on the front and I am wearing a BKREA hat.
USCL: You have said many times in real estate, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. Why do you think that’s the case?
BK: Because there are just too many people in the market to know everyone. I still make a ton of prospecting calls each week with a goal of 100 connections with owners each week to find out if they have anything for sale. If I hit my goal each week, that’s 5,200 connections per year. There are 176,000 investment properties in NYC with about 250,000 owners. I’m a good prospecting caller but I can’t call 250,000 people. I need to have a market presence in order to be known so folks will call me as opposed to me having to call them. If they don’t know me, they won’t call me.
USCL: Let’s follow that up with a discussion about market presence. What is that to you and how to you accomplish “getting known”?
BK: Market presence is the process of doing things such that people get to know you and what your capabilities are.
These initiatives take many forms and all of them are important. The first and most obvious is making those prospect calls.
In addition to those calls, we do email campaigns, text campaigns, hard mailings, which are very underrated, networking, public speaking, doing podcasts, being on TV and being active on social media.
It also includes cultivating relationships with the press so that you can feed them story ideas and get quoted in stories they are doing.
Why do we do these things – to become known. Why do we want to become known?
To the ignorant observer, they think it is all about ego and that these activities are self-serving. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
The fact is that “being out there” greatly increases the probability that you will get in the way of information that is going to help your client get a better result.
Maybe you meet someone who can help with an issue a client is having. Perhaps you have someone reach out to you who read an article you wrote or saw you at a networking event and calls you with an opportunity for a client.
Maybe you meet a buyer who will pay the client more money for their asset.
At the end of the day, it’s all about the client and by putting yourself in a position to potentially help your client in a better way or a new way, or a different way, you have to do what you can do to help that client. Being out there puts you in that position.
USCL: Bob, you have a lot to be proud of as you celebrate your 40th anniversary. What are you most proud of regarding your professional accomplishments?
BK: One day I was having a drink with one of my old Massey Knakal partners and he said to me, “BK, you know that you and Paul completely changed my life. I could never thank you enough for all you guys did for me!”
That sums it up.
We implemented a servant leadership culture and made people believe they could do better than their best. We trained them intensely. We built up their self-esteem and constantly made them aware of how important their role was to the success of the firm.
Today, in the New York Investment sales business, there are 30 companies, or divisions of companies, owned by, or run by, people who learned the business at Massey Knakal. That is what I am most proud of.
