The best view of New York City might come from a nearly windowless conference room on the 12th floor of an office building in Midtown Manhattan.
Spread across 10 folding tables, the maps are held together with paper, tape and sticky notes and detail every block and lot (27,649 properties) in Manhattan below 96th Street on the East Side and 110th Street on the West Side.
The map is the work of Bob Nakal, who created it by walking every thoroughfare and street during the desolate first months of the pandemic.
Updated regularly, parcels are color-coded with highlighters and sticky notes to indicate whether they are for sale (green sticky notes), recently sold (red sticky notes), city-owned (pink highlights), or under construction (green highlights). Orange highlights signify underutilized parcels and potential trades.
For 40 years, Nakal's obsession with data and creative marketing techniques have earned him a rare position in the fiercely competitive New York City real estate industry and he is widely recognized by industry experts as the top commercial sales broker by transaction volume in the nation's largest commercial market.
“This is not a real estate business, it's an information business,” Nakal, 61, said recently as he gave a tour of a room he called the “Map Room,” which displays his cartographic creations.
Nakal has sold 2,329 properties, including offices, townhouses, garages, apartments and warehouses, for a total of $22 billion since he began his Manhattan business in 1984. His largest transaction was the sale of several Brooklyn properties owned by Jehovah's Witnesses, including the Watchtower building in Brooklyn Heights, for about $700 million in 2016.
He became increasingly involved in big deals that shaped the New York skyline, including the $238 million sale of a parking garage on Manhattan's west side that is now the Spiral office tower, one of the city's tallest buildings.
The sale not only provided Nakal with enormous wealth but also gave him access to elected office.
New York City, and Manhattan in particular, is becoming an increasingly difficult place to live for ordinary people, a message Nakal emphasized to lawmakers.
He says he's interested in affordable housing because increasing it is vital to the city's future, but he also acknowledges that he would benefit from more real estate and development deals.
At a private luncheon in Midtown, he urged Gov. Kathy Hockal to do more to encourage the conversion of office buildings to housing, and he also recently listened to Mayor Eric Adams.
He told the mayor that the city has a lot of underused real estate that could be redeveloped. He specifically mentioned public housing developments, saying they could be preserved while building new affordable and private housing on the same sites.
“You have a huge block of land with social housing that has 1,000 people living there and not generating any tax. You could have 10,000 people living on that land, some of which would generate tax revenue, and potentially create tens of thousands of jobs without displacing anyone,” he said.
Some progressive lawmakers and academics blame the property price crisis on developers and agents like Nakal, whose goal is to get property owners to bid the highest. They argue that ever-increasing sales prices spur investors to develop projects that will generate bigger profits, which often result in more luxury apartments.
“A broker's job is to surround themselves with powerful people and get better deals, so the closer they are to the circles of power and money, the better deals they can broker and the more money they can make,” said Miguel Robles-Duran, an associate professor of urban planning at Parsons School of Design at The New School.
State Sen. Jabari Brisport, a democratic socialist from Brooklyn, said Nakal should not have a say in building affordable housing.
“He is an example of everything that's wrong with our current housing crisis: We have allowed housing to be treated as an investment, a financial commodity, rather than a guaranteed right,” Brisport said.
“This is an individual who has amassed enormous wealth by exploiting New Yorkers looking for a place to live,” Brisport said, adding that Nakal has used his income “to buy political favors from the rich and powerful.”
Nakal said policies enacted by the New York State Legislature in recent years have significantly slowed new home construction, exacerbating the housing crisis and making developers feel under attack, leading them to invest in other areas, including the South.
“There's a huge philosophical difference between thinking of housing as a right and thinking of housing as a business,” Nakal said. “This is way beyond what a real estate broker can understand, but I don't think anyone would disagree that increasing supply makes rents more affordable for people.”
Every Monday, Nakal begins work with a handwritten notepad containing a list of several dozen homeowners to call. The list is a mix of current clients looking to sell, owners who aren't ready yet, past clients and some cold calls.
He makes the calls himself and follows up with emails until he gets through to the owner on the phone.
In a city crowded with agents, Nakal said his name comes to mind every time a call comes in, and he emphasizes to potential clients that his long history of only representing sellers is a sign of loyalty.
“Hire me. I'm on your side. I've been through it all, done it all, and I can protect you,” Nakal said of his pitch. “No one else can say that because they don't have the same track record.”
His determined strategy helped him win over real estate mogul Harry B. McCraw.
Nakal had been making random calls to McCraw about the one-storey retail building for more than two years, before finally calling McCraw late one night in an attempt to bypass his assistant.
It was the start of a long and lasting business relationship that has generated more than $350 million in sales to date, including the first property on East 60th Street. Macklowe eventually asked him to sell the property in 2005, nearly 20 years after that first phone call, and he sold it for $11.75 million. The building was redeveloped into 42 units of affordable housing.
In his office, surrounded by printed spreadsheets, hardback books detailing trades and computerized numbers, Nakal tracks just about everything and recites statistics as if they were the back of a baseball card.
In fact, his oversized business cards resemble baseball cards, with a picture of him holding a baseball glove on the front and his annual sales figures on the back.
He also records his performance.
What percentage of your calls to previous clients are to hear about another property owner who may be looking to sell? Nine percent.
What percentage of prospects hire him after the pitch meeting? About 26 percent.
What percentage of prospects who visit the Map Room for a presentation meeting end up hiring him? 100%.
Over the years, sales have reflected the ups and downs of the economy, he said, and while real estate sales have been declining recently, they're not as bad as they were during the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s.
Nakal sold just seven properties in the first year of the pandemic, the lowest number in the past 30 years, and while sales improved in 2022, they have declined since then due to a sharp and steady decline in big-ticket transactions over $10 million in the city.
He said rising interest rates are contributing to the decline in building values and scaring owners away from their properties.
Nakal said most owners selling property today are forced to do so because of divorce, disputes or death.
“When something puts downward pressure on prices, people are not going to sell,” he said. “The fourth quarter numbers are going to be terrible.”
During the week, Nakal divides his time between his office at the Madison Avenue headquarters of the real estate firm where he works, JLL, and another building in Midtown where he rents space exclusively for maps.
Nakal frequently gives tours of the Map Room and often refers to maps when developers visit, sometimes using a magnifying glass to zero in on an area.
On a recent morning, he was showing around two executives from the Rockefeller Group, a real-estate firm, who were looking for a home in Manhattan.
They scanned maps for potential locations. “There’s nothing for sale on the Upper West Side,” Nakal noted. He pointed his telescope pointer toward Central Park, noting that there were no green Post-it notes in the area.
He pulled the wand toward himself and showed the developer several vacant properties on the Upper East Side and lower Manhattan. None of them were suitable right now, they said: They were either too small or too expensive.
One of the developers, Meg Brod, senior managing director at Rockefeller Group, said other commercial brokers can tell you what's for sale in the city, but no one can match Nakal's insight and knowledge of trends, neighborhoods and opportunities.
“You want to work with brokers who are on the cutting edge of what's coming into the market,” Brod says. “We want to be among the first to know that information.”
Around 6 p.m., Nakal is usually at an event or gathering, part of his goal of attending one networking event per weekday, totaling 261 events per year. He rarely turns down an invitation to speak at a conference or appear on a podcast, no matter how small the audience.
Last year, he embraced a different kind of networking: He hired a social media manager who taught him how to post on LinkedIn and how to post on X. And soon Received a lot of support Telling stories about past deals and making fun of myself.
He has no plans to slow down or retire anytime soon: “I never run out of energy,” he says.