It wasn’t until a chance encounter with a former client that led Bob Knakal, touted by his company as the broker with the most buildings sold by a single agent in New York, to combine his passion for real estate, baseball and statistics in a marketing tool modeled after the look of a classic Topps baseball card.

Knakal, head of the New York Private Capital Group with JLL Capital Markets, said the client thought he was still at Cushman & Wakefield, even though he’d been employed by JLL for four years.

The client encouraged Knakal to get the word out. That got Knakal to wonder how he could let people know that he’s at JLL while showing off his deal-making track record. The answer: assemble a scorecard of the over 2,200 New York buildings he’s sold since he began his real estate career nearly 40 years ago.

“I played baseball my whole life,” Knakal said in an interview, adding he played in high school as well as at the University of Pennsylvania. “My affinity for statistics started with tracking my pitching stats in Little League. … I was a baseball card collector as a kid. … The statistics on the card came out of a spreadsheet I kept since I started" in real estate in 1984.

For brokers, who usually are independent contractors and typically can move from one shop to another, letting clients and potential clients know where to find them is critical. Marketing what they do and where they’re doing it is essential to their success, especially during economic slowdowns. Knakal created his baseball card at a time when investment sales activity is expected to drop off further because of rising interest rates and tighter access to the capital needed to make real estate transactions work.

Since October, Knakal has mailed out about 10,000 physical copies of the card. In November, he used it as a “bio” at a national conference he spoke at in Dallas before promoting it through social media.

The marketing pitch looks like a hit.

“I received hundreds of calls from folks who got [the mailed cards] saying that they thought it was very creative,” Knakal told CoStar News, adding he’s gotten a few assignments as a result. “It’s impossible to know what made the client make their decision, but the card prompted them to call.”

He also had a taste of being a big leaguer of a sort when he ended up autographing about 300 cards for attendees at the Dallas conference. The event also has led to talk of several business opportunities, and Knakal said he may hire a broker he met who wants to move to New York.

His recent social media posts of the card have motivated many people to reach out.

“This card has received great traction,” he said, adding it got almost 100,000 impressions on LinkedIn in about a week.

The creative baseball card pitch that came from a chance encounter also mirrored in some way how Knakal, who described himself as a “lifelong diehard Yankees fan,” started out in real estate.

A native of Bergen County, New Jersey, Knakal wanted to be an investment banker when he was a freshman at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Seeking a summer job that would look good on his resume while he was in college, he was driving around one day in Bergen County and ended up dropping his resume at real estate firm Coldwell Banker, thinking it was a bank.

“They were the only one hiring college kids for the summer,” Knakal said. “I got into real estate by accident.”