When sports teams start winning big, when a band goes from indie nobody to mainstream success, there are always bandwagon fans, those who claim to have been there from the start.
TerraCRG founder and CEO Ofer Cohen is not a bandwagon fan of Brooklyn.
He bought his first Kings County property in 2004 in Bushwick, long before Brooklyn became a brand that cities around the globe have tried to replicate.
After being named chairman of the board at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership last month, Cohen talked with Real Estate Weekly about growing his office leasing and retail teams, why he won’t expand his firm to other boroughs, and what the next 10 years will look like for Brooklyn investment sales.
A native of Israel, Cohen moved to Manhattan in 1996 at the very beginning of the dot-com boom. He worked at a startup for a few years before launching his own.
When that venture went under, he worked in consultancy, doing marketing advisory services for Israeli ventures looking to set up shop in the U.S. In his early 30’s and having just moved to Brooklyn, Cohen was itching to make a career change, and brainstormed with a friend on what business to open.
“We ran through all these ideas, and then we thought, why don’t we buy a building?” said Cohen. “Then we thought, where do we buy one? What about Brooklyn?”
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