NYC Property Advisors Stacom, Silverstein Plot Out a New Firm
February 21, 2025
Darcy Stacom, Wendy Silverstein launch real estate advisory firm
February 24, 2025
New York heavy hitters Stacom, Silverstein join forces to create boutique advisory firm
CoStar, February 23, 2025
By Andrea Cheng
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Dealmaking in New York, the largest U.S. commercial property market, is about to involve a new power broker firm helmed by two industry veterans with more than 40 years of experience.
Darcy Stacom, the former longtime chief of CBRE’s NYC Capital Markets Group, is partnering with Wendy Silverstein — whose career history includes serving as head of acquisitions and capital markets at Vornado Realty Trust — to start StacomSilverstein, a boutique real estate advisory firm.
The pair plan to rely on their capital markets expertise — bringing buyers and sellers together to finance debt and equity real estate transactions — while handling asset and corporate-level acquisitions, dispositions, restructuring, and bespoke investing, according to a statement Friday announcing the partnership.
The firm may have just launched, but New York-based real estate investor Vornado has already signaled it plans to work with StacomSilverstein.
Stacom, who’s worked on over $150 billion of commercial real estate deals and was named New York’s top broker eight times, left CBRE a year ago to start her own firm, Stacom CRE. Silverstein’s career stints also included helping to liquidate New York REIT as its chief executive. Both are 64 years old.
Silverstein “brought the restructuring and [other expertise] to the table, I bring the people element,” Stacom said in an interview, adding Silverstein broached the idea about joining forces at the end of last year. “There are different sides to this coin. We completed this. … I know how to broker a transaction. I know how to do restructuring, but it’s not something I do on a continual basis. [We can] brainstorm off each other.”
The two women have worked together before, including the 2015 deal that added Norges Bank as co-owner alongside Trinity Church Wall Street to an 11-building portfolio in the Hudson Square neighborhood. Stacom also was involved in the liquidation of New York REIT.
“Our combined 40-plus-year experience each [is] somewhat overlapping and quite different,” Silverstein told CoStar News. “Darcy and I are friends. We’ve always been there to support each other. We’ve had each other’s back for a long time. … I called at the end of the year [and told her,] ‘I’m giving up on this retiring thing.’”
Smaller by design
Stacom and Silverstein said their new firm will be boutique in nature. Market share rankings that are often a major focus of big shops won’t be a concern.
“I was always under pressure. … You have to constantly battle to make sure you are at the top,” Stacom said. “We are going to be more selective and dedicated.”
The firm, based at 300 Park Ave., has a team of five and is expected to grow to no more than a 10-person shop, Stacom said.
Vornado CEO Steven Roth showed his support.
"These two women are uniquely qualified and extraordinarily experienced to handle the challenges and opportunities of today's dynamic real estate market," Roth said in the statement. "Clearly these two professionals getting together certainly is a case of the old adage where one plus one equals three. They will be getting many important and complex assignments from us."
Both Stacom and Silverstein said they have had a long history of working with Roth.
“We are both free to call his cell phone,” Silverstein said, adding she met Roth in 1992.
As to the outlook for New York, Stacom, who’s behind some of the biggest office sales in the city, said the office market remains bifurcated. Her deals have included $2.8 billion for the GM Building in Manhattan, a high price for a single office building, and $1.3 billion paid for 30 Rockefeller Plaza, making it one of the biggest office condominium transactions. On the residential front, she brokered the $5.4 billion sale of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, one of the largest single-asset real estate transactions in U.S. history.
“The high-end existing office building with long term leases on Park Avenue ... is doing well,” she said. “The average real estate is still suffering. It’s going to need a lot of help.”
