WFC Wells Fargo and Company

By Craig Karmin 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (December 12, 2018).

Real-estate broker Eastdil Secured has hired a top U.S. executive from a European financial firm, a move that could bolster the broker as its parent company Wells Fargo & Co. weighs a sale of Eastdil.

Gary Phillips, head of acquisitions for Allianz Real Estate of America, a unit of the German-based insurance and asset manager Allianz SE, is leaving for Eastdil. He starts this month as managing director for real-estate sales and capital markets in New York, according to people familiar with the matter.

Eastdil is bringing in Mr. Phillips as the firm and Wells Fargo continue negotiations to sell the real-estate firm, according to people familiar with the matter.

The bank has been exploring a sale of Eastdil Secured for about a year, but more recently Eastdil Chief Executive Roy March has taken over the process, these people said.

Eastdil has been looking for a big name hire since losing some of its top brokers to aggressive rivals. The firm, which specializes in sales and refinancing, lost a top-performing group in New York City led by Douglas Harmon and Adam Spies, when they moved to Cushman & Wakefield Inc. in 2016. In May, Newmark Group Inc. poached a senior hotel sales and financing team.

Eastdil is a niche firm that focuses on the business of selling buildings. It has held a leading position in major markets like New York and Los Angeles. It is smaller than rivals like CBRE Group Inc. and Cushman & Wakefield that offer services like property management that offer steadier income and are less vulnerable to economic cycles.

Real-estate brokerage firms have faced new challenges this year. The long rally in commercial real estate is about nine years old and has been showing signs of losing steam more recently, with prices leveling off in 2018 after a big run.

Mr. Phillips, 39, is a veteran investor who previously worked at a real-estate investment arm of Deutsche Bank AG and with Clarion Partners, a New York-based property investment firm.

At Allianz, Mr. Phillips was responsible for deploying billions of dollars to buy U.S. real estate and he often was involved in complex transactions. He will be working on similar real-estate deals in his new position, only now from the sales side rather than the acquisition side.

Write to Craig Karmin at craig.karmin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 12, 2018 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

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