Savills Studley Adds to Firepower at NYC Office

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Michael Rotchford

New York—Savills Studley has both acquired advisory and investment firm RP Capital, headed by Michael Rotchford and David Heller, and has also brought on board Paul Leibowitz and David Krantz, formerly of CBRE, to form a new capital markets group in its New York headquarters office with current Executive Managing Director Woody Heller (no relation), the company announced Tuesday.

Together, Rotchford and Woody Heller will co-lead and expand the firm’s capital markets platform in New York City and the Tri-State region. Savills Studley’s Capital Markets Group will offer a full range of integrated capital market services, including traditional investment sales, debt and equity capital raises, structured transactions, advisory assignments, and securities transactions. The group will handle all commercial asset types.

“Capital markets is an important part of Savills’ business globally,” Jeremy Helsby, CEO of Savills, said in a prepared statement. “New York is a key component of helping Savills secure global capital flows for the benefit of our global clients.”

Prior to founding RP Capital in 2015, Rotchford served as executive vice president at Cushman & Wakefield and president of Cushman & Wakefield Securities Inc., where he was responsible for the firm’s investment banking activities. Previously, he had been a partner in The Saratoga Group, an investment-banking boutique that specialized in structured financing for corporate and real estate clients. He also served for over 10 years in investment banking positions at J.P. Morgan, Dean Witter Reynolds and Merrill Lynch.

David Heller

Before joining RP Capital, David Heller was senior vice president & head of the office platform for CBRE’s Investment Properties Institutional Group in New York. He began his career at Cushman & Wakefield, working directly with Rotchford in the firm’s Corporate Finance & Investment Banking Group.

Leibowitz spent 20 years at CBRE, including 14 years in the Investment Properties Group. As executive vice president, he was involved in more than $30 billion of transactions, involving office, residential, retail and development sites for clients comprising institutions to family trusts. In recent years, he led a team that focused on multifamily conversions and development sites, achieving leading market share for brokered multifamily transactions over $50 million in 2014 and 2016 and leading market share for development sites over $50 million over the past three years.

In his 15-year career in CRE, Krantz most recently served as senior vice president in CBRE’s Investment Properties Group, where he was involved in more than $2 billion of transactions. Prior to that, he spent 10 years at The Praedium Group, an institutional fund manager, where he was responsible for the acquisition, asset management and disposition of the firm’s New York City portfolios. At Praedium, Krantz worked on the acquisition, financing and disposition of more than $5 billion in transactions comprising nearly 20,000 fair-market and rent-regulated apartments.