Broker’s Angle is Back!  In the relaunch of Broker’s Angle, we sit down with Brandon Singer, the founder of MONA.  MONA stands for Making of a New Age and Brandon shares what he believes to be the new age of retail.  Brandon shares his journey from leaving Cushman & Wakefield to starting MONA during the pandemic.  

Tune in as we dive deep into the challenges and opportunities facing modern brokers, discuss trends in retail, and get an insider’s view of what’s next for MONA.

Transcript

Hal Coopersmith: Welcome to Brokers Angle. We are speaking to Brandon Singer, the founder and CEO of MONA. Welcome Brandon.

Brandon Singer: Thank you, sir. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me.

Hal Coopersmith: So how did you get into the industry?

Brandon Singer: I started my career in 2007, straight out of college, straight out of undergrad.  I went to school in Washington, D.C. I grew up nearby in Long Island. You know, New York City obviously was always the game plan to come back to. And when I was, 11 or 12 years old, I was on a family trip in Florida and I was on, we were on the highway, my father and I, and he, my dad pointed at a, my father who’s in commercial real estate and had a history in his career in New York City, commercial real estate, working for the likes of ESG, which is now CBRE and Arlen, which doesn’t exist anymore, a big developer, but,  he said to me, he pointed at a Wendy’s restaurant on like a pit stop or a truck stop. And he said to me, you see that Wendy’s right there. Somebody found that location and made a lot of money doing it. And you’d be really good at that. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he, you know, he explained it to me and it always sort of resonated in my head, the way he would describe the industry and describe how the business worked. It was like fascinating to me. I was like a, you know, he would talk about it and I just had questions. It was almost like, okay. You know, in Hebrew, they say Besheret. It was like meant to be. Like, I like, I would just, you know, he would talk about the business and I would always hear it and kept it in the back of my head.

I went to school. I didn’t study real estate. I studied business. I wanted to go into the music industry, actually.  because I’m a really big music fan. A really big hip hop fan. And I just wanted to be like a record executive. but that dream kind of got shot down with the emergence of iTunes as the way that people listen to music. You know, no one bought CDs anymore, so therefore the music industry was shifting, no one knew if it was going to make money, all the artists, you know, no one was, everyone was laying off jobs. So that, you know, fantasy went away and I decided to pursue a career in commercial real estate and taking what my dad sent me in retail and I called a family friend, right when I was looking to graduate in 2007. He worked at a local New York City retail leasing firm that doesn’t exist anymore, but he gave me a job, and they were very relevant at the time, it was called RKF, and he gave me the opportunity to apply for a job there, and I got a job there, and it was great, and I learned a lot in a very short amount of time, and kind of got thrown into the fire, and that’s how I started, 2007.

Hal Coopersmith: So, you mentioned the Wendy story about your father. He was in commercial real estate. Why do you think he decided to say that to you at that moment of time?

Brandon Singer:  He still is in commercial real estate in a different part. He’s in the industrial side of things, and he was in the industrial side of things prior to the industrial boom that we’ve seen in the past however many years with Amazon. And all the internet guys, but,  others taking,  fulfillment space and last mile. But, the reason I think he said it to me, he always makes a joke with me that, good, that brokers lack intelligence and therefore I’m a good broker, teasing me, but,  and the reason he says that is because the best brokers are the most persistent. Typically, the ones that keep going and don’t take no for an answer. They want to get the deal done. They want to get the client. They want to get the meeting. They just keep going. And, you know, logic would tell you, Stop calling. Just hang up the phone, Call somebody else. They said no. Right? But, Brokers, Best brokers keep going, and I think he saw that in me, and for whatever reason, I guess, saw my love of, Not that I love retail, like I loved retail, now I do, but like, you know, he, I think he just saw and thought it would be a good fit and, when I was in high school, I interned at a Long Island based, mostly industrial focus, real estate brokerage firm, kind of had an idea about how it all worked.

And, yeah, that’s how he sort of. Started me or told me about the business.

Hal Coopersmith: Or maybe you just love Wendy’s a lot.

Brandon Singer: Maybe  it was Wendy’s. Yes. I haven’t had Wendy’s in a long time, but those chicken nuggets are really good.

Hal Coopersmith: Right. Yeah. And the Frosty too.

Brandon Singer: Ooh, yeah. been a minute. But yeah.

Hal Coopersmith: So you talked about persistence as a great quality of a broker. What are some other good qualities in your mind for a broker?

Brandon Singer: Communication is key. You need to communicate.  you need to be responsive. You need to pick up the phone, you need to get back to people. You need to be. thinking of people, keeping people top of mind, which is a lot because if you’re a good broker, you got a lot of clients, which means you got to always be thinking of everyone at every moment.

So I think the best brokers are the ones that are the most persistent, the ones that don’t take no for an answer, the ones that are run through a wall for their clients if they need to, but understand how to do that in a way with tact, and sort of in a, in somewhat of a, you know, designed to do it in a way that creates friends, not enemies, right? Making sure you’re able to make deals happen in a way, a delicate balance of not pissing people off. You’re going to piss people off, but trying not to make enemies and making people your friends along the way, which is tough. That’s what a good broker does.

Hal Coopersmith: so you talked about all the great qualities of a broker. Can you talk about one transaction yourself where you provided an extraordinary level of service?

Brandon Singer: The one that comes to mind is the Gucci, flagship, in the Meatpacking District, which was a deal that was one of the first big deals, big, big, big deals. We did it at Mona. Quite a few have followed since then, but I think the reason it got done was, frankly communication and being responsive. What had happened was, I don’t know if you’ve seen the signs around the city, but it’s sometimes, there’s certain signs that, or all our signs say text Mona. It has a text message number. At the time, before we had a marketing team. That came to my phone.

Hal Coopersmith: All the text messages?

Brandon Singer: Every single one. So Mona was me.

Hal Coopersmith: How many text messages?

Brandon Singer: A lot. And if I showed you them, you’d be like, Oh my god. Ridiculous. You know, people show, Drawing, you know, Boobs on the Mona, And, and, and other inappropriate things That I’ll not say on the podcast. But,  Funny, right? People, Ridiculous things. And sure enough, Every, like, Ten text messages Would be, like, Two. So 20 percent of them were, like, relevant text messages as it relates to the spaces we were marketing. And sure enough, I get this one text message that was like, you could tell was from somebody that didn’t speak English as their first language. And it was like, it’s sort of skewed, somewhat Italian it kind of looked like. Went back and forth with the person, sent the information and sure enough, like a week or two later, a buddy of mine, who’s a broker, a very prominent broker, called me and said, Hey, a client of mine is really interested in your, in the corner. You’re marketing on the corner of 14th and ninth. I said, who is it? He said, I can’t tell you. He said, but I promise you it’s a it’s a career defining deal for both you and I. You can’t tell me, but come on. And I like never really thought that it was the one that I was text messaging, but he kind of alluded to it. Like there was a communication. I was like, whatever. And then sure enough, it turned out to be Gucci. Which is now open in their flagship, and that’s a crazy story as well, how that deal proceeded and progressed, but they’re now there on a two level billboard, crazy flagship, that really all happened because of broker responsiveness.

And frankly, the fact that I am, I’m on my phone all day. If you know me, I’m like literally the most responsive person ever. And that’s just because of how I’ve learned to be as a broker.

Hal Coopersmith: So how was your education like? What are the things that you did to become a better broker? How did you learn the industry?

Brandon Singer: I’ve had great mentors. I will say that I’ve had. I’ve been very lucky and very fortunate at a pretty young age to work for some of the most, you know, prominent retail brokers ever. I started my career, RKF. Robert Futterman, at the time was, you know, icon, legend in New York retail brokerage, and I worked for people there that,  are still in the business. So I’m gonna give him two props, too much props because there’s competition, but I, you know, I’m kidding, but like people that taught me the business, Ariel Schuster, a few other ones that I look up to and sort of, I learned from, I would ask questions, he would spend the time to like teach me and, you know, we’d go around canvassing together. I left there and make a very long story short and I wound up at Cushman and Wakefield probably about four or five years later. And I started working for, a woman named Joanne Podell, who at the time when I joined her sort of had this like crazy ascent to the top of the retail leasing mountain, you know, representing Nike and TD Bank and Empire State Realty Trust and the list goes on and doing some mega, mega, mega deals around New York and other cities. And I was right there for it the entire time. In my mid to late 20s, I was super young and I just kind of got thrown into the fire. So by the time I was like 30, 31 years old, I had 10 years of experience with some of the biggest deal makers and deals that have ever, the city’s ever seen. And, being able to sort of absorb stuff through osmosis, meet people, be in the meeting, be at the lunch meeting, be at the dinner, be at the, you know, the Nick game with the right people, whatever it was, I was always sort of learning. And sure enough, you know, I’d say I was probably 31, 32, 33 years old at the time. This is in 2016, 17, 18. When the retail apocalypse, quote unquote, happened, if you recall, was when the retail died and the vacancy in New York and other major cities was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. You know, like, not to sound like Donald Trump, he says that all the time, but it was like that.

Everything was like empty. Half, half of New York was, was vacant. If you remember. But for whatever reason, presumably because of my age, but also the fact that I had that experience, I was. killing it humbly as a broker. We were doing deals with everyone. We were doing deals uptown, left downtown, new, new retail brands, Beta, Fithouse, Shofield, Eden. We did the Supreme flagship. We did the Warby, first Warby Parker deal, like all these new brands that like were like emerging into the scene. We’re basically filling categories of brands that, we´re kind of like yesterday’s news. Like, so instead of Lance crafters, it was Warby Parker instead of, you know, sleepies or mattress firm. It was Casper. And so, right. So that was the trend, and I had a lot of relationships in that world, called the DTC world, whatever the case may be, and I sort of was able, I was able to take the lessons I had learned from my career to that point and apply them to this new age of retail where a lot of the founders were like my age. Your age, we’re similar age, right? And, it worked and that’s really it.

Hal Coopersmith: Can you walk me through the decision to start your own firm?

Brandon Singer: Yeah, sure. I don’t know if you have a psychologist degree or a therapist degree, but you may need one or I needed one at the time. Similar to what I was just saying about a lot of those new brands. I kind of just saw, I saw it very clearly when I was at Cushman that someone was going to figure out,  that there should be a retail advisory firm that’s like really targeted to these, that type of transaction. Not that the deal is any different, but it’s a whole new world of retail occupier, of retail tenant. So I actually went to Cushman, and I tried to get them to do Mona there. And, you know, at the time, it still is obviously, it’s a public company, they kind of like, it’s an office leasing company for the most part, and they kind of just didn’t really see what I was saying, and a buddy of mine, who had done a couple deals with and someone I developed a very close personal relationship with through the business. He and I were at lunch.  A guy by the name of John Cohen, who works at RFR. And I just told him my idea. And he said to me, you got to come pitch his bosses is, you know, AB Rosen and Michael Fuchs, R and F. You got to come pitch them on this idea. They’d love it. And I looked at him like, right, like, you know, okay, right.

You tell me when they want to meet with me about my little brokerage idea. Sure enough, you know, I actually was like, I didn’t hear anything for a couple weeks. And the story is I was actually going away on a vacation to Mykonos and Israel to go party. Really, I was just going to party. And, for three weeks I had a whole big trip with one of my, a few friends from college, one of my best friends from school.

We had a trip planned. And the day before I’m going, I blew off work, I was getting a haircut, I went to go buy bathing suits and sacks, and my phone rings. It’s like, 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s my buddy John, he says, Hey, are you free to come meet with Aby right now? And I’m like, dude, like, no deck, I have no pitch, I have, I’m in shorts and a t shirt, like, You know, I mean like I guess like yeah, yes, the answer is yes.

I’ll figure it out. So I dropped everything. I ran home I called my now co-founder and partner who was working with me at Cushman on my team at the time. I said do me a favor just put a piece of paper together with like 10 or 15 different logos of new age brands, the ones I just described, you know, Warby Parker Casper, Kith, Supreme, Schofields, you name it, Eden, Beta, you name it, all these new brands that most people really hadn’t heard of if they weren’t like, in the know. And he goes, what? And I go, just do it, just put it on a piece of paper, I’ll tell you, I’ll meet you on the corner of whatever, 51st and 5th in 30 minutes, I’m running home, I’ll get a crazy, crazy, crazy opportunity. So I meet him on the corner, he gives me three pieces of paper, same thing, you know, copies, and I explain to him what was happening, and he’s like, wow, like, alright, good luck. So now, I ran, I ran to, at the time, Lever House, where RFR’s office was, and I sat with Aby, and I pitched him on the idea. And he said to me, this is a good idea. What do you think? You know, we went through some of the specifics and details, and, he asked me to put a business plan together. And I was like, you know, I walked out of there and now my whole trip was ruined.

Now I can’t, you know, I was going to party for three weeks and I’m thinking to myself, I can’t go party. I have like this crazy opportunity in front of me. Like I’m, I’m going to cancel it.

Hal Coopersmith: A life changing opportunity.

Brandon Singer: I have to go like now this vacation that I was so excited for, I was like, ah, right. I went, whatever, obviously had a great time, but I came back and, make a really long story short. We decided to put the company together in the fall. And there’s a way more to the story that I, it just, we’d be here for too long for the podcast, but some amazing experiences that I had even building this thing with them.  but we were like this close to launching, like literally like the contract was about to be signed, maybe like a week or two away. And my phone rings March 11th or so of plus minus of 2020, you know, from,  From John and AB and they said, you know, we got to put this thing on hold, like look what’s going on in the world, you know, I said, I get it, a couple months later, we, you know, we stayed in touch and sure enough, that September, of 2020, we launched, and it’s been going since then. So three and a half years, the company now is 26 people between brokers and support and we’re growing, we’re continuing to grow. We’ve done, hundreds of deals since we’ve been launched. Big deal, small deals. I’ve been joined, as from partners, you know, very, very top, very well respected veterans, 20, 30 year veterans in the industry have joined me, as some of my partners. People from all different firms, which is, gives us a really nice culture because people take the best and leave the worst from all the other firms and put it together. And we’ve really grown a strong presence here in New York. It’s been amazing that’s three and a half years and change, you know, it’ll be four years in September. And, you know, we’ll see, we’ll see where, where it goes. But we have a lot of ideas on how to grow it and keep going and, continuing to build a very, very strong, prominent,  retail leasing and advisory firm, here in New York and other cities as well.

Hal Coopersmith: So you launched September 2020.

Brandon Singer: September 21st, 2020, to be exact.

Hal Coopersmith: Hard to remember in some senses what the city was like, but it was desolate. I remember looking for my, our own office space around then.  And, difficult time for the city. Certainly we were working on a lot of surrenders and workouts, commercial wise, what was it like on the brokerage front? For you and launching your brokerage at a very difficult time.

Brandon Singer: At times I thought to myself, what the hell did I just do? Really? And that probably was like a year of like, what the hell did I just do? you know, the city was in bad shape. And at the time I had to put together a team of brokers that worked with me, who in their right mind, respectfully, just to, you know, to Mike, not to demean our profession would want to start their career as a commercial real estate broker in New York city in COVID New York. You had to have, you know, nothing else going on. Or have some screws lose. I don’t know what it was, but we did the best we could. We put a team together. And when I, I don’t say that disrespectfully to anyone, like, clearly I had some screws loose too in order to make this happen. And, we put a team together, and we tried, you know, I had, frankly, in some ways I had everything to lose. In other ways I had literally nothing to lose. So it depends how you look at it. That was it. And we went to work every day.  You know, I said this earlier, but my friends went to Miami. Everyone was partying six months of like college again. Everyone went to warmer weather. I would sit there on my Instagram looking at them like, Oh, I hope this works out. I hope this pays off. And I was here in New York busting my tush every single day. Weekends, weekdays, nonstop. Sure enough, here we are, and it worked out. But, you know, we got a little lucky. Obviously, the market has come back in the retail world like nothing anyone I think ever expected. Especially this quickly relative to what we went through as a city and as a country and as a world, frankly.

I think the other parts of the industry here in New York, office leasing has been, you know, slow to catch up. But retail has been on fire. Luxury was the first one that fueled it was that was the first type of retail occupier that really is a category just expanded like crazy, different reasons as to why, there was a lot of free money that was given out by the government at the time. And I think a lot of that went to probably things that, maybe it shouldn’t have. Luxury goods in particular. Watches, bags, cars, you name it, and all that stuff. The pricing went through the roof, if you, or still is through the roof. Inflation, obviously. And since then it’s just kept going. Pricing in some areas is three, four X where it was before COVID. Not everywhere. Some places, some has not caught up. Some is not even close to catching up. But, Retail has been a really sort of strong, happy, good story generally. And we got lucky with timing when we started the company. We worked hard, of course. But the harder you work, the luckier you get. That’s a famous saying that I always say. My mentor, Joanne, used to say that all the time.

Hal Coopersmith: I think that was Mike Bloomberg.

Brandon Singer: Maybe that’s where she got it from. I don’t know. But it’s, but, but it’s true. So, that’s sort of how I’ve built the company. And we’ve built the company in the amount of time that we have.

Hal Coopersmith: And at Cushman, you were a broker. Now at Mona, you’re a broker, you’re a CEO, you’re a founder. What is it like wearing the additional

Brandon Singer: I’m the head of HR. I’m the head of marketing. I’m the in, in-house therapist. I’m the in-house doctor. I’m the in-house lawyer, you name it. So, I guess that’s what a CEO does. But, it’s been an amazing learning experience. Frankly, it’s been something that I’ve learned on the go. I was thrown into the fire. With a spotlight on me. That was like nothing that, most people I think have when they start their first time being a CEO, I, I’d always have been entrepreneurial. I always, that’s why I became a broker. You don’t have a salary. I’ve always been out there making deals and that’s been sort of something I’m good at, but, I knew I had it, but I had, you know, I knew I had what it took to, to do it but you know. Learning how to run a company, how to balance budgets, how to deal with cash flow, payroll, lawyers, legal situations, etc, etc, etc, HR things internally, you name it. All the things that you go into running a company are things that I had to learn first hand. I had no experience whatsoever. But, you know, I’m forever grateful and appreciative for that opportunity that I was given, by the people that gave it to me and sort of believed in me for sure. Not even a question. But I, you know, humbly, we, we, we did a good job and I could not have done it without my co-founder and my partner, Mike, who’s our head of operations and administration. We have a very good one too. The things I’m really bad at, he’s great at and the things he’s terrible at, I’m amazing at. So that we just got lucky with a partnership and it’s been. Great. But the CEO part of it has been one of the most exciting, probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever had to, I’ve ever experienced. Just being able to call the shots and make the decisions and you know, hoping that they work out and believing that they will in my gut, and so far, so good.

Hal Coopersmith: And you talked a little bit about the market kind of segments of the rebound, talk about what you’re seeing right now.

Brandon Singer: The market’s just, it’s just on fire. Keeps going. My guess is as good as anyone’s if that or when or if that will stop. Obviously, I hope it doesn’t. But you never know. There’s a lot of Funky stuff going on in the world right now. Obviously, we have an election this year. We have the conflict in the Middle East. We have the conflict in Russia. You have interest rates that are, you know relatively high for our life, you know our time in the business world They’re not relatively high compared to where they were, call it, in the 70s, but they are high, higher than they’ve ever been in the past, call it, 15, 20 years.

So you have a stock market that is just exploding, keeps going up and up and up and up and up. You have employment that’s, is very low, unemployment rates, unemployment rates that are very low. So all those things in some ways are really good, but in other ways are not so good. So until, you know, the jobs numbers get worse and the economy softens, interest rates are going to stay high. And obviously, as you know, and as a commercial real estate lawyer, that’s the whole business when, when interest rates are high, it makes things a lot more challenging. but again, retail has really not been affected, to the way that you think one would think it should be, or was pre COVID and the retail apocalypse times, and we’re hopeful that that continues.

Hal Coopersmith: And you talked about emerging brands that you wanted to, that were kind of the backbone of Mona. What do those brands need to do in order to be successful?

Brandon Singer: So, the new age brands, the direct to consumer brands, the sort of, a lot of the online digitally native brands that have expanded into brick and mortar in the past, call it, definitely four years since COVID happened, but even before that. It’s interesting. That was our backbone at Mona when we started making of a new age is what the acronym for Mona stands for. Some of my friends in the business will tease me and say, it should be Moana making of a new age, but we get rid of the a. Renaissance retail is where, we thought of the name why Mona the Renaissance period. So that sort of was our backbone and our expertise when we started, but you know, what’s happened is as retail has evolved so quickly, a lot of the old players, the guys that, you know, the LVMHs of the world, the Kerrings, the Richemonts, the, you name it, not just the luxury guys, in any category,  they’ve adapted to sort of this omni channel strategy, which is a strategy of, brick and mortar stores, social media, the internet, putting it all together, and,  basically understanding that the consumer, no matter where they buy, whether it’s on their phone or in a store or on the website, they’re a consumer and they’re a customer. So it’s all one. It’s not like what it used to be, if you recall, when it was like, buy in the store versus the internet, right? Remember when internet shopping came out, it was like one versus the other. There was no one that like did it all. But we’ve seen a lot of these Brands, whether they’re new age or they’re old school, kind of become smart as to how they’ve built their brick and mortar strategy, where the store, the physical output is, is just either a place to engage with the consumer. You know, the Tiffany store on the corner of 57th and 5th has an amazing cafe, amazing restaurant in that. That’s to create customer experience and loyalty. I don’t know if, breakfast at Tiffany’s is a famous, you know, movie and, and, and thing, but I don’t know if other retail brands in the past would have had that level of dedication to other, experiences for their customer than they do now.

Hal Coopersmith: Well, that is a wonderful note to end things on. Brandon Singer, thank you for being a part of Brokers Angle.

Brandon Singer: Thanks for having me.