Michael Laginestra and Michael Geoghegan, of CBRE, won the first prize Henry Hart Rice Achievement Award for “A Hat Trick for the NHL” at 1 Manhattan West.
The pair were celebrated at the Real Estate Board of New York Sales Brokers Committee’s 73rd Annual Cocktail Party held at Club 101 last week.
Their deal exceeded all of the NHL’s expectations that initiated with a much simpler request: to improve the day-to-day operations of their current headquarters.
In their search for potential options, Laginestra and Geoghegan explored renovating the NHL’s current headquarters, other available office space and collaborating with established ice rinks, in addition to new development opportunities within the Hudson Yards, Manhattan West, and World Trade Center communities.
Laginestra and Geoghegan were credited with closing “game-changing negotiationsˮ to secure a 160,000 s/f marquee-branded NHL headquarters relocation to Brookfield’s One Manhattan West with projected delivery in 2020; a new NHL-emblazoned public ice rink in the new development’s plaza; and set into motion a grand vision that will create a two-story, experiential NHL retail presence at the center of the ice rink with a private observatory deck overlooking the ice.
David Carlos and Ira Schuman, of Savills Studley, won the second prize Robert T. Lawrence Memorial Award for “Repositioning Real Estate or Reimagining the Promise Land? How Savills Studley Helped Jewish Theological Seminary Transform Its Campus for the 21st Century” at 543 West 122nd Street, 3060 Broadway, and 415 West 120th Street in Manhattan
Through three years of analysis, negotiation, and large leaps of faith, Carlos and Schuman unlocked tremendous value in the nonprofit’s 300,000 s/f of unused development rights and other off-campus properties, raising $131 million to help JTS re-imagine its campus to meet its growth, financial and modernization needs.
What started off as a capital campaign to renovate the institution’s library, evolved, by way of the brokers ingenuity and tenacity, into an ambitious portfolio-wide plan.
The multi-tiered solution — comprised of multi-party sale and leaseback transactions with Esplanade Partners and Savanna, a never-before-achieved tax lot subdivision on land with an existing building, the actualization of existing open space to solve the site’s zoning puzzle, the expansion of the campus’s green space by over 50 percent, and the simultaneous closing of contracts with necessary provisions for 543 West 122nd Street, 3060 Broadway, and 415 West 120th Street — paved the way for the construction of a new 100,000 s/f, on campus building with a library, conference center, and dormitory, with millions left for the nonprofit’s endowment.
Scott A. Singer and Kathleen McSharry, of The Singer & Bassuk Organization, took home the third prize Edward S. Gordon Memorial Award for “It’s Not Just a Job, It’s An Adventure” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn
The team arranged the Navy Yard’s first conventional real estate mortgage loans and reworked its ground leases dating back to the Mayor Ed Koch administration.
Their solution created a sandwich/sub-leasehold financing structure that BNYDC will utilize for decades to come and resulted in the simultaneous closing of two loans with Symetra Life and Sterling Bank that utilized net-leased assets as collateral.
