Longtime CBRE broker Darcy Stacom, who's worked on some of the most expensive multifamily and office deals in New York City, is leaving the world's largest brokerage firm to launch one of her own at a challenging time to get big deals done.
Stacom, who served as chairman and head of CBRE's New York capital markets group for the past 22 years, said her experience navigating tough markets and closing sales in difficult circumstances will help her firm known as Stacom CRE succeed.
"I think this is the right moment to strike out on my own," she said in a statement. It went on to add that "the nature and size of the firm will allow for fewer internal conflicts," allowing it to be nimble at a time when financing approvals are more difficult.
During her more than four decades selling office and residential towers, Stacom has worked on more than $150 billion of commercial real estate transactions. The role she played in several landmark commercial property sales in New York City earned her the nickname 'Skyscraper Queen" in several media outlets.
At CBRE, Stacom ranked as the firm's No. 1 investment sales professional in the Americas eight times and consistently placed in the top 1% of CBRE brokers in the Americas, her new firm said. Her deals include the $5.4 billion sale of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, one of the largest single-asset real estate transactions in U.S. history, the $2.8 billion deal for the GM Building in Manhattan, a major single-office building sale, and the $1.3 billion deal for 30 Rockefeller Plaza, making it one of the biggest office condominium transactions.
Stacom is branching out on her own at a time when investment sales of apartment complexes and office properties in New York have plummeted due to a lack of new investment, limited recovery from the pandemic and higher interest rates.
One the office side, uncertainty about rental growth and leasing activity played a role in a dramatic drop in sales activity. Over the past 12 months, $5 billion of New York City office properties sold, an annual total well below the long-term annual average of $17 billion, according to a report from CoStar Market Analytics.
The sales volume was "the lowest on record since 2009, a year that marked the height of the Great Recession," according to the report.
On the multifamily front, sales volume has slowed to a crawl, with 2023 fourth-quarter figures failing to top $1 billion, something "that has only occurred one other time since 2010," according to another CoStar Market Analytics report. All told, $6.4 billion of multifamily properties traded hands last year, "a figure that lagged behind 2022's total of $14.5 billion and was the second-lowest volume year of the past decade by a fair margin," the report stated.
'Iconic Transactions'
Stacom leaves CBRE having just closed a large multifamily deal. She and Alana Bassen of CBRE are said to have been the brokers on developer A & R Kalimian Realty's sale of the 42-story, 310-unit glass-facade building at 200 W. 67th St. to the Gotham Organization and Carlyle Group for $265 million, CoStar News reported this week.
CBRE said it wishes Stacom well in her new venture. "During her more than 20 years at CBRE, Darcy drove some of New York’s most iconic transactions and has been a champion of diversity and giving back to the community," Matt Van Buren, president, New York Tri-State for CBRE, said in a statement.
Her new firm will provide consulting and strategic services, handle ground-lease negotiations and offer advisory services for clients looking to prune, restructure or sell their entire portfolios, Stacom CRE said.
Before joining CBRE, she worked for 20 years at Cushman & Wakefield. When she left there to join CBRE in 2002, Stacom served as a board member and the firm's representative on the executive committee of the Real Estate Board of New York.
Looking ahead, Stacom said her new firm will help open doors for more women to serve in leadership roles in commercial real estate.
"This industry needs more women-led enterprises and I look forward to continuing to forge that path and bring the next generation of women leaders along with me," she said in her statement.