Amid a wave of recent commercial broker shuffling, CBRE has poached HFF’s David Fowler to join its New York investment-sales division.
Fowler, who previously served as a senior director at HFF for six years, started at his new firm earlier this week with the title of first vice president, a CBRE spokesperson confirmed.
At HFF, he specialized in joint-venture equity and commercial real estate financing. He was part of the Andrew Scandalios-led team that brokered several blockbuster deals such as GIC’s $1 billion stake purchase at 60 Wall Street and Savanna’s $640 million purchase of 5 Bryant Park. Before joining HFF in 2012, he worked at Massey Knakal Realty Services.
The CBRE Capital Markets team is led in New York City by Darcy Stacom and Bill Shanahan, who brokered 2017’s largest building sale – HNA Group’s $2.2 billion purchase of 245 Park Avenue. (The tower may soon sell again, as SL Green Realty negotiates a controlling-stake purchase.)
The CBRE team has lost some key players in recent years – Marcella Fasulo, to Cushman & Wakefield in 2016, and Paul Leibowitz and David Krantz, to Savills Studley last year. The other members are currently Eric Negrin, Ryan Spector and Carl Shorett. Early last year, Stacom and Shanahan renewed their contracts for five more years.
Even as the investment-sales market drastically slowed last year, CBRE and HFF held their ground in the higher-end institutional-sales space. In The Real Deal’s annual ranking of top New York City investment-sales brokerages, CBRE took second place with $6.02 billion, while HFF landed in fourth with $2.34 billion.
The market has also seen a flurry of broker moves lately: Newmark Knight Frank poached Eastdil’s hotel investment-sales team, Avison Young hired Cushman & Wakefield’s James Nelson, and Bob Knakal was “terminated” from Cushman. Eastern Consolidated’s brokers are also on the hunt for a new home as the firm announced it will be shutting down next month.