Rosewood Realty Group is launching a national brokerage division that will focus solely on off-market properties outside its New York metro area base, which the company said is in response to strict state rent laws passed last year. Rosewood announced the expansion Thursday.
Led by Aaron Jungreis, Rosewood has tapped in-house broker Jonathan Brody to lead the new division as its vice president of national investment sales, and Rosewood’s Alan Soclof will be the director of the new division. The Manhattan-based firm has focused on the multifamily market but will also target office and mixed-use properties in its expansion.
“We are taking the same Rosewood approach to New York and applying it to specific states in up-and-coming markets,” Jungreis said in a statement. The company already has office and multifamily deals in the pipeline for markets including Florida, Texas, Michigan, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. It has closed more than $120 million worth of deals so far, according to Jungreis and Brody.
The move comes in response to new rent regulations that New York’s state legislature passed and that Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law in June. The real estate community has blamed those rules for squeezing profits and dramatically slowing down transactions in the city’s multifamily market, which was Rosewood’s specialty.
Rosewood placed fifth in The Real Deal’s ranking of investment sales firms with $1.7 billion worth of sales in 2018.
Soon after New York’s rent law changes last year, Jungreis told The Real Deal that his firm had already started pivoting away from focusing so strongly on multifamily deals, and Brody indicated in a statement that this new division was part of that effort.
“We prepared ourselves for NYC’s rent law change that went into effect this past June,” he said. “We formed a team quickly and began our journey in other targeted markets.”