Michael Ferrara, 28
2015
Michael Ferrara’s first real estate deal was a slaughterhouse. A real slaughterhouse. It was 2008, and he was canvassing Queens neighborhoods looking for a 5,000-square-foot lot for a construction company, when he stumbled on a 2,500-square-foot butcher shop, with a 2,500-square-foot parking lot.
“On the first inspection I went in there not really knowing what to expect,” Mr. Ferrara said. “There was hay on the ground for chickens, there were cages all over the place.”
But the price was right ($1.3 million) and the space was big enough. He made his first sale. By that point, Mr. Ferrara already had a couple of years on the periphery of real estate under his belt. When he was 19 and still at Indiana University, he started out as a jack-of-all-trades for a family friend’s real estate business; he did building maintenance one day, administration the next and showed apartments the day after that. The next two summers he worked at the Long Island firm Sutton & Edwards, and continued working there for a year after it was acquired by Colliers International, before setting his sights on Manhattan.
Mr. Ferrara landed at the Highcap Group when it was still an outfit of five (today it is 20) and was recently promoted to senior director.
As Superstorm Sandy raged outside his window (with eight or nine houseguests who had trekked uptown to his Midtown apartment, which still had power), he was finalizing the details on a $33 million sale of 69-73 Greene Street, his biggest sale to date. Since then he’s steadily drummed up a great list of sales: 154 Stanton Street, a vacant building at the corner of Suffolk Street for $4.9 million; 401 East 57th Street for $6.1 million; and a two-building sale on Thierot Avenue in the Bronx for $10.6 million.
Last December, Mr. Ferrara did both sides of the deal for 10 Greene Street for $14.5 million.
“That took over a year, from start to finish,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But when we finally got that closed it was unbelievable for me, professionally. Everybody walked away happy.”—M.G.
