This real estate queen charts the path to mega deals

The best view of New York City may be from a windowless conference room on the 12th floor of an office building in Midtown Manhattan.

Spread across ten folding tables, a map constructed with paper, tape and sticky notes details every block and parcel – 27,649 properties – in Manhattan, below 96th Street on the East Side and 110th Street on the West Side.

The map is the work of Bob Knakal, who made it by walking through all the lanes and streets during the desolate first months of the pandemic.

The lots are updated regularly and are color-coded with highlighters and sticky notes to indicate which are for sale (green sticky notes), recently sold (red sticky notes), city-owned (pink highlights) or under construction (green highlights) . Orange highlights mean a lot is underutilized – and a deal may need to be made.

For four decades, Mr. Knakal has used his obsession with data and creative marketing techniques to achieve a rarefied status in the cutthroat world of New York City real estate. He is widely regarded Through industry professionals to be the top commercial sales agent by number of transactions in the largest commercial market in the country.

“It's not really about the real estate sector, it's about the information sector,” said the 61-year-old Mr. Knakal during a recent tour of what he calls the Map Room, where his cartographic creation lives.

Since 1984, when he first started in Manhattan, Mr. Knakal has sold 2,329 properties — offices, townhomes, garages, apartment buildings and warehouses — for a total of $22 billion. His largest transaction was the nearly $700 million sale in 2016 of several Brooklyn properties owned by the Jehovah's Witnesses, including the Watchtower Building in Brooklyn Heights.

He has increasingly been involved in major deals that are shaping New York's skyline, including the 2014 sale of a parking lot on Manhattan's West Side for $238 million, now the Spiral office tower, one of the tallest buildings in the city .

The sales not only brought Mr. Knakal significant wealth but also gave him access to elected officials.

The city, and especially Manhattan, has become increasingly unaffordable for ordinary people, a message Mr. Knakal has emphasized to lawmakers.

He says he cares about affordable housing because creating more housing is essential to the city's future, though he also acknowledges that more real estate and development deals could benefit himself.

At a private lunch in Midtown, he urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to do more to encourage the conversion of office buildings to housing. He also recently bent the ear of Mayor Eric Adams.

The city, he told the mayor, owns numerous properties that are underutilized and could be redeveloped. He specifically mentioned public housing developments, which he says can be preserved while new affordable and private housing is built nearby on the same lots.

“Look at these huge tracts of land that have public housing on them, where a thousand people live and they don't generate any taxes,” he said. “There is an opportunity to have 10,000 people live on that land, have some of it be tax-generating and create tens of thousands of jobs without displacing anyone..”

Some progressive lawmakers and academics blame the affordability crisis on developers and real estate agents like Mr. Knakal, whose goal is to secure the highest bid for property owners. They argue that increasingly higher sales prices encourage investors to develop projects that can generate greater profits, often resulting in more luxury apartments.

“The agent's job is to surround yourself with people with power to make better deals, so the closer you get to the circle of power and money, the better deals you can make and make money,” said Miguel Robles . Duran, associate professor of urban planning at the New School's Parsons School of Design.

Senator Jabari Brisport, a Democratic Socialist from Brooklyn, said Mr. Knakal should have no say in creating affordable housing.

“He exemplifies everything that is wrong with our housing crisis right now, which is that we have allowed housing to be treated as an investment, as a financial asset, rather than as a guaranteed right,” Mr. Brisport said.

“This is a person who has become very wealthy off the backs of New Yorkers looking for a place to live,” Mr. Brisport said, adding that Mr. Knakal has used his earnings “to buy political favors from the rich and powerful.”

Mr. Knakal said in response that policies implemented by New York lawmakers in recent years have significantly slowed the construction of new housing and worsened the housing crisis. They have also made developers feel attacked, causing them to invest elsewhere, such as in the South.

“There is a very big philosophical difference if you believe that housing is a right than if you believe that housing is a business,” Mr. Knakal said. “That's way beyond the scope of a real estate agent to figure out, but I don't think anyone can argue that if you added more supply, rents would be more affordable for people.”

Mr. Knakal starts every Monday with a notepad with a handwritten list of several dozen property owners he can call. It's a mix of current customers trying to sell, property owners who aren't ready, and previous customers; some are cold calls.

He calls himself and follows up on emails until he gets the owners on the phone.

In a city full of real estate agents, the calls keep his name top of mind, Mr. Knakal said. He emphasizes to potential clients his long history of representing only salespeople, saying this shows his loyalty.

“Hire me, I'll have your back, I'll be in your corner because I've seen it all, I've done it all, and I can protect you,” Mr. Knakal said, describing his pitch. “That's something other people can't say because they don't have the same track record.”

That single-minded strategy is how he brought in real estate magnate Harry B. Macklowe.

Mr. Knakal cold-called Mr. Macklowe about a one-story retail building for more than two years before he finally got Mr. Macklowe to speak, calling him late one night in the hope of bypassing his assistant.

It was the beginning of a long-term business relationship that has resulted in more than $350 million in sales to date, including that first property, on East 60th Street. Mr. Macklowe eventually hired him to sell it — nearly two decades after their first phone call — for $11.75 million in 2005. The building was redeveloped into 42 affordable homes.

At his office, Mr. Knakal is surrounded by numbers on printed spreadsheets, in bound books detailing his deals, and on his computer. He keeps track of almost everything and rattles off stats like he's reading the back of a baseball card.

His oversized business card even resembles a baseball card, with a photo of him wearing a baseball glove on the front and his annual sales figures on the back.

He even keeps track of his own performance.

What percentage of calls to former clients hear about another property owner who may be in the market to sell? Nine percent.

What percentage of prospects hire him after a pitch meeting? About 26 percent.

What percentage of prospects who visited the Map Room for the pitch meeting hire him? A hundred percent.

Over the years, he said, his sales figures have reflected the highs and lows of the economy. Real estate sales have fallen recently, but not as sharply as during the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s.

In the first year of the pandemic, Mr. Knakal sold just seven properties, his lowest in three decades. While sales improved in 2022, they have since fallen, reflecting a steep and steady decline in the number of large deals above $10 million in the city.

Rising interest rates have contributed to a decline in building values, he said, causing owners to hang on to properties.

Mr Knakal said most owners selling today have no choice as they are forced to sell due to divorce, disputes or death.

“When you have a circumstance where something puts downward pressure on value, people don't sell,” he said. “The fourth quarter numbers will be terrible.”

During the week, Mr. Knakal divides his time between his office at the Madison Avenue headquarters of JLL, the real estate company where he works, and another building in Midtown where he rented space only for his card.

Mr. Knakal regularly gives tours of the Map Room and often refers to the map when developers call, sometimes using a magnifying glass to map a neighborhood.

On a recent morning, he was escorting two executives from the Rockefeller Group, a real estate company, who were looking for a housing option in Manhattan.

They scanned the map for possible locations. There is nothing for sale on the Upper West Side, Mr. Knakal noted. Reaching over Central Park with a telescopic pointer, he indicated that there were no green sticky notes in that area.

He pulled the pointer again and directed the developers to several available properties on the Upper East Side and in Lower Manhattan. None were the right choice at the moment: too small or too expensive, they told him.

One of the developers, Meg Brod, senior managing director at Rockefeller Group, said other commercial real estate agents could have a say in what was for sale in the city. But no one could match Mr. Knakal's insight and knowledge of trends, neighborhoods and opportunities.

“You want to work with a real estate agent who is aware of what's coming into the market,” Ms. Brod said. “We want to be one of the first to hear about this.”

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Knakal usually attends an event or meeting, part of his goal to attend 261 networking events each year, one for each business day. He rarely turns down an offer to speak at conferences or appear on a podcast, no matter how small the audience.

Over the past year he has embraced a different form of networking. He hired a social media manager to teach him how to post on LinkedIn and X, and he quickly did so gained a large following by sharing stories about past deals and making fun of themselves.

He has no plans to slow down or retire anytime soon. “I have no energy anymore,” he said.