CEO SPOTLIGHT
Views from the
Four they’re and floCEO pos uris s tel ition h in als Re ing t cha al E heir llengstate comp ing m New anie arke Yo s to t rk h survow ive Top
There’s no disputing that the current
cycle has tested the mettle of CEOs
across all industries. In commercial
real estate, while there’s arguably been less
turnover in the top spot than in, say, financial services, the rough seas have called on
the skippers’ navigational skills. Real Estate
New York recently
By Paul Bubny
interviewed four
company leaders—
Peter Hauspurg of
Eastern Consolidated, Mark Jaccom of
FirstService Williams, Edward Kalikow of
Kaled Management and Michell Seir of
Studley—to get the view from their vantage points. Each represents a different industry sector, but all share the conviction
that they and their companies will be here
when the storm passes.
PETER HAUSPURG
Chairman and CEO, Eastern Consolidated
Peter Hauspurg
founded Eastern Consolidated with partner
Daun Paris in 1981
and leads the firm’s
global deal-making
and property sourcing activities.
Real Estate New York: How is Eastern
Consolidated faring in the current investment sales market?
Peter Hauspurg: We did a little over $4
billion in 2007 at the peak of the market.
Around October or November of that year,
the market started to change, financing
started to dry up and condo sales started to
look downwards. So for the last 18 months,
we’ve basically been doing small deals—$3
million, $10 million, $15 million of multifamily, office and retail condos. Luckily,
these are experienced brokers and it’s
easy for them to switch from a $100-mil-
lion market building to a $10-million market building. The opportunity is that as
the pie has gotten a lot smaller and there
has been culling in the ranks of the sales
brokerage community, we’ve been able to
pick up some really good people from our
competitors who normally would probably
not have made a move.
The dollar volume is down about 65%
from the peak of ’07, from $4.6 billion
to about $1.3 billion last year. However,
the number of deals was only down 25%,
from 74 in ’07 to 56 in ’08. I’m happy to
see that our guys kept the number of deals
pretty much up there, but the dollar volume is shrunken. But for the first time in
a year, we’re looking at six to 10 situations
