Cushman & Wakefield is out as one of the city’s commercial brokerages as the Mamdani administration carves a less controversial path forward.
The Department of Citywide Administrative Services is in final negotiations with five brokerages for the city’s leasing responsibilities, Crain’s reported, citing the city database PASSPort. Those brokerages are Savills, JLL, CBRE, Newmark and JRT Realty Group.
The contracts are expected to begin in two months and run until November 2029. They come into focus more than a year after the agency released a request for proposals for five commercial brokerages, specifically requiring applicants to disclose if any primary brokers working on the DCAS account “have or have had any personal relationships with DCAS staff, Client Agencies, or the City of New York and describe the extent of each relationship.”
“We look forward to finalizing these contracts with our awardees and are confident they will bolster our efforts to manage the city of New York’s real estate portfolio,” a spokesperson for DCAS said.
The brokerage contracts for DCAS are being highly scrutinized after litigation and allegations of corruption encumbered the city’s last round of leasing efforts.
The city hired Cushman and CBRE in 2017 to represent it on office deals. Cushman’s work ultimately received increased attention due to broker Diana Boutross, whose phone was seized by investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office in as she returned from a trip to Japan with Ingrid Lewis-Martin, a former top adviser to Eric Adams, and Jesse Hamilton, then the deputy commissioner of real estate services at DCAS.
Lewis-Martin was indicted on charges that she accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping hoteliers speed up their projects.
Cushman’s contract was supposed to expire in 2020, but the city kept extending it. Last May, it temporarily extended CBRE’s deal, but not Cushman’s.
JRT Realty sued Cushman, alleging the brokerage — along with city officials — conspired to unfairly control lucrative city leasing deals, though a judge decided JRT failed to prove defamation or breach of contract. An attorney for JRT appealed the judge’s dismissal.
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