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Spurned real estate star plans late career revival powered by AI

manhattan skyline

ozgurdonmaz/Getty Images

  • Commercial real estate sales star says data from his 40-year career is key to unlocking the power of AI.
  • Bob Knakal has sold $22 billion of property, making him one of America's most successful brokers.
  • He says he was fired by property giant JLL in February 2024. Now, he plans a career revival.

Bob Knakal climbed to the top of the commercial real estate sales business by focusing not on billion-dollar Manhattan skyscrapers, but on the tens of thousands of ordinary apartment buildings and land sites across New York City.

Now, the 62-year-old sales executive is adding a new approach by using artificial intelligence.

He says his new sales firm, BKREA, will harness property data and market observations that he has meticulously collected since the mid-1980s and couple it with the blooming powers of AI.

Using the much-heralded technology, Knakal believes he can compete with far larger real estate services companies with only a handful of employees. BKREA presently employs 15 workers and Knakal doesn't imagine getting much larger.

"The extent to which the world is going to change over the next five years is going to blow away what's happened over the last 40," Knakal said. "Realizing that, the first thing I did when I started the new firm โ€“ my first hire was an AI guy."

Many commercial real estate firms and professionals have begun to use AI โ€“ or have plans to โ€” in order to gather market insights and sort through mountains of data, produce promotional and marketing materials, and help organize and manage client relationships and outreach.

Knakal says he believes his firm can harness the technology more effectively in its niche because the quality and consistency of his data is better than those of rivals.

Although New York City's property records are available to all online, Knakal has gathered reams of proprietary observations over the years, including nuanced information that is often not public. A rental apartment building slated for demolition and redevelopment, for instance, may have had holdout tenants that compromised its value. A vacant land site, meanwhile, may have an access agreement with its neighbor that would allow construction work to proceed more smoothly, enhancing its price tag.

If "you're putting bad data in, you're getting bad data out," Knakal said, adding that he spent three years during the pandemic "personally verifying 2,417 development site sales in the city" to further glean such insights.

"So how do I compete with the big firms?" Knakal asked. "Show me even one of them that's had the same head of research for 10 years."

Tenure at JLL

If Knakal, whose outward demeanor comes across as perpetually sunny, seems slightly irked by some of the big corporate real estate firms that dominate the nation's commercial property sales and services businesses, that's because he is.

Knakal built his career largely outside of that world, founding the small brokerage company Massey Knakal in 1988 with business partner Paul Massey. In subsequent decades, the pair grew the company into one of New York City's largest and most prolific property sales firms. In late 2014, the two men sold the 250-person business to the global commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield for $100 million.

Knakal joined Cushman as part of the sale, but left in 2018 for the rival corporate real estate services giant JLL.

Knakal's tenure at JLL came to an end in February 2024 when he was abruptly fired.

Recounting his exit, he said that he had been a guest on CNBC early that month to discuss the property market with the news anchor Brian Sullivan. He was subsequently warned by a person from JLL's marketing department that such media appearances first required company approval. Knakal said he explained to the person that his employment contract offered him "unfettered access to the press."

Shortly after, Knakal was the subject of a weekend profile in The New York Times. On Monday, he said he received a call from a JLL executive requesting an urgent meeting. Knakal sat down with the executive in a conference room in JLL's Manhattan office.

"As soon as I walked into the room, the head of HR walked in," Knakal said. "I knew I was being fired."

Knakal said his dismissal capped off what had been "the dark ages of my career."

"I don't think they appreciated what I brought to the table," he said.

A JLL spokesperson said: "We thank Bob for his contributions to the firm and wish him all the best in his future endeavors."

Massey, who also departed Cushman in 2018 and remains close with Knakal, said that while Knakal was one of the "most upbeat people" he knows, he had become "honest about how he was feeling: he wasn't having as much fun" in the commercial real estate business.

A desire to adapt and compete

BKREA mixes in analogue elements as well. In his new office on West 36th Street is an enormous printed map of Manhattan below 110th Street on the west side and 96th Street on the east to the island's southern tip. Propped across 8 tables, the 24-foot-long, 8-foot-wide printout details 27,649 commercial buildings and development sites in a way that both conveys the immensity of the market but is also more comprehensible to the senses.

A map of Manhattan laid across a number of tables
Bob Knakal's map room

Daniel Geiger

Seth Samowitz, a 30-year old data expert who Knakal hired earlier this year to spearhead BKREA's AI efforts, said that he first thought having the giant map in an overwhelmingly digital world was "crazy." He has since come around.

"Honestly, it's the best marketing tool in the entire world," Samowitz said.

Knakal said he has used the map as a key prop in pitching his services to 26 clients so far. "I've gotten 26 exclusives."

Currently, he has been hired to sell about $2 billion of property assets, his largest pipeline in years. Knakal said he has sold 2,342 properties totaling about $22 billion over his career, more than almost any other broker in the country, he believes.

James Nelson, 49, now head of tri-state investment sales at Avison Young, began his career at Massey Knakal in the 1990s. He considers Knakal a mentor, saying that he admires Knakal's hunger to continue to adapt, innovate, and compete.

"Bob talks about what he's going to be doing in 10, 20, 30 years and it's being a broker," Nelson said. "He enjoys the process and the thrill of the hunt."

Read the original article on Business Insider

Access to business leaders is the most sought-after in-office perk, says JLL's Neil Murray

Workforce Innovation Series: Neil Murray on light blue background with grid
Neil Murray.

Work Dynamics at JLL

  • The office โ€” and the role it plays in companies โ€” is at the center of workforce change.
  • Neil Murray, a Workforce Innovation board member, discussed workspace purpose, leadership, and AI.
  • This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

Commercial real estate has experienced a tumultuous few years, with pandemic-related office vacancies and high interest rates. The sector is also at the epicenter of significant changes to the global workforce.

"It is the most incredible time to work in this industry," said Neil Murray, the CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL. "We are at the center of some really important strategic conversations about the very nature of work."

Work Dynamics is a division of the global real-estate corporation that collaborates with corporate clients on technology, employee experience, and design strategies. Murray says its goals are to help client companies attract and retain employees and foster productivity.

In its annual global Future of Work survey, which involved 2,300 corporate real-estate and business decision-makers, some 64% of respondents said they expected to increase their head counts by 2030.

JLL's third-quarter earnings beat estimates โ€” it reported revenue of $5.87 billion, an increase of 15% from the same period in 2023.

Murray talked about companies mulling the purpose of the office, how leaders can incentivize employees to willingly go into their workplaces, and how to harness AI for concrete breakthroughs.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How have the priorities of your clients changed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes that brought to office life?

What we do for a living changed dramatically through the pandemic. Previously, corporate real estate may have been seen as a sort of factor of production. We weren't intentional about why we had space and where we had it, what we wanted that space to do, and its function. Is it a cost line, or is it an investment?

Suddenly every chief executive in the world had a view on real estate. It brought much more intentionality about its function within the organization and its ability to contribute to broader organizational goals.

Our business now is about helping our clients navigate that complex situation where they're planning to grow their workforce over a number of years, balancing what that might look like in the macro environment we're living in. It's a very complex environment for leaders to think through.

What's the state of return-to-office you're seeing among your clients?

There's a fairly even split between companies that are embracing some sort of hybrid policy and those that want their people back full time.

In our Future of Work survey, we found that 85% of organizations had a policy of at least three days of office attendance per week, and 43% expected the number of days in the office to increase by 2030.

It's still very much an evolving scenario. The metrics of productivity that we've relied upon to make database decisions don't always capture the challenges that businesses are facing. The time people spend doing emails or logged in doesn't necessarily translate to productivity.

One client, for example, has found that while their productivity metrics looked just fine, the number of patents had fallen off a cliff from prepandemic levels.

That led to this notion that what we're missing is, as the phrase goes, people painting on the same canvas at the same time.

Now we've seen some high-profile companies coming out, wanting more time spent in the office, saying there's something lost around culture and the collective sort of personality and purpose of an organization because of remote working. Companies are finding it really difficult to balance that.

What aspects of the workplace are most effective for enticing workers to return to the office?

The overwhelming evidence is that it's not a single amenity but it's other people โ€” and, in particular, leaders. Companies that are intentional about their leaders being present have seen the greatest results in terms of people coming back.

What people crave is proximity to leadership for personal development. So without getting leaders back into the office, you can add whatever amenities you want and you'll still have significant challenges.

Clients that enacted three-days-a-week mandates but didn't focus on leadership presence have exactly the same attendance as those who didn't have three-day mandates.

Could that be attributed to people just wanting to be visible when the boss is around?

I wouldn't purport to understand entirely the psychology of humans, but I do believe that our research and my own experience is that people enjoy other people. The most important amenity in any workplace is that notion of community and other folks to chat to.

The notion of apprenticeship in all aspects of what we do is very real. The ability to learn from others, to absorb how things are done or navigate the complexities of an organization, is really difficult to do among 30-minute slots. You don't get to sort of naturally observe through osmosis what's happening in the world around you.

You mentioned in one of our roundtables that companies need to focus on consistent, breakthrough innovation across the organization as opposed to incremental innovation from a centralized department or team. Why is that important, and how can leaders work toward that goal?

When you centralize innovation, you can get stuck in the paradigm of trying to incrementally improve a particular way of working. But the technology breakthroughs mean that it's fundamentally shifting how we do business.

In my business alone, the rapid adoption of AI tools in daily business use has surprised us all. We are an organization with 250 years of data on everything from how buildings are occupied and used to what they cost to run to their utilities to their capital values.

The tools available to us now to cut and splice and curate and make connections in that data, which we were never able to make before at scale, are driving us to think about the business in completely different ways.

Breakthrough innovation comes about when you use a large language model to interpret multiple data sets and then you start to ask the second, third, and fourth questions, going deeper and deeper into a particular topic. You find things that you could not have possibly seen or connected otherwise.

Read the original article on Business Insider
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