What's everyone's thoughts on this? Good move for both AKS Capital Partners and W&D?
Why would W&D acquire his firm only a few months after he founded it? How big of a difference will this make for W&D? Will Aaron inevitability show his dark side as a psycho and get forced out?
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I'm sure they didn't pay much for AKS.
It's pretty simple. There was almost no upside for Appel to be on his own. He's a heavy enough hitter in the brokerage world that his splits/bonuses are almost certainly favorable, so he's not carving out a lot of new space for himself by being on his own. What he does do, however, is take on all the overhead risk and cost of founding a new business without the institutional support of an existing brokerage. I'd bet he was making far less money as a principal of AKS than he was as a heavy hitter at JLL. It was basically just his team anyway, plus the other name partners, so at the end of the day I'd wager good money that being on his own was more dilutive than what he had before.
Makes more sense to look at this like any brokerage which is poaching top talent. If W&D had tried to pry Appel away from JLL a year ago, they would have had to pay him better than he was making at JLL - that delta is effectively the same as whatever the "purchase price" is for AKS. Appel & cronies get out from under the various risks and costs of being business owners, and Walker and Dunlop get a strong additional to their roster.
Me: "why was this posted anonymously?"
Oh.
The JLL/HFF merger is such a clusterfuck. I wonder how many heavy hitters now-JLL has lost in the last three months. Talent fleeing in multiple major markets.
Not the OP, but I was at JLL for three months post merger, and can confirm it was nuts.
All the great JLL brokers, especially in NY, basically said fuck this, I'm out. When the merger was done, it really seemed like HFF was the one acquiring JLL. Like implementing their structure and hierarchy, taking over as heads of all cap market service lines, etc and not caring who they pushed out from JLL. Plus the tons of rumors about potential service lines getting cut and brokers leaving.... knew it was time for me to peace out.
The exodus started as a trickle soon after in my market too, but shit really hit the fan this month. A whole team just left.
Blame the street - analysts said grow your capital markets division now and they did. At the end of the day, capital markets is a total afterthought for the full service shops. The overhead is bigger than any other division, and profits smaller. The public firms have sold the dream that everyone DEMANDS a full service shop. That's false - tenants do so they don't have to run around to other shops looking on a national level. In reality, peopled loved HFF because they had absolutely no conflicts and nimble - both gone.
That was the beauty of HFF (RIP), the ability to not get lost in it all. There's not a single dude in i-sales that didn't want to die at HFF, and now it's just like the others.
That said, filling holes in the SE at the expense of just about every gateway city is beyond me. But I mean,,,, look at those NKF signing bonuses....
That's for damn sure
What are the NKF signing bonuses looking like?
HFF came in basically said we are taking over your Freddie Mac lending platform. That platform, along with the rest of agency lending, was one of the biggest revenue generators for JLL pre-merger.
Damn. And RIP HFF
You guys see the smear article JLL planted in TRD?
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