Will Silverman

Who they are

Will Silverman and Gary Phillips are Eastdil's answer to Newmark's Doug Harmon and Adam Spies, and Commercial Observer seems determined to keep it that way: its Power 100 has ranked the Eastdil duo #18 two years running, directly behind their rivals at #17. The Promote counts both pairs as having cornered Manhattan's trophy investment-sales market. Silverman is also the firm's go-to explainer. When Eastdil won Green Street's 2024 office sales crown, his read was that buyers "grew conviction in buying on basis, even if the underwriting wasn't there yet."

The deal list is a tour of Manhattan's recovery. Silverman and Phillips sold Ohio STRS's 590 Madison, the IBM Building, to RXR and Elliott for just over $1B, Manhattan's first billion-dollar office sale in a few years, working alongside Eastdil chief Roy March. They brokered Jeff Sutton's roughly $1.8B Upper Fifth sales to Prada and Kering, and Vornado/Crown's $350M Uniqlo retail sale at 666 Fifth. Silverman explained the luxury-retail buying spree in three parts: cheap European corporate debt, bigger "upstairs-downstairs" stores, and a retreat to super-prime corridors. Lately the pair have leaned into lender-driven trades. They had the MetLife-encouraged listing of Rockwood's 2 Grand Central Tower, which drew the Sakhai family's Sovereign Partners, and they quietly marketed Rithm-affiliated Elecor's 60 Wall St, which is headed for a residential conversion.

The Promote has praised Silverman as a case study in broker craft: information arbitrage plus narrative. On the Declarations podcast he described mining NYC parking-ticket data to show more delivery vans near a Red Hook distribution site, and arguing that tech jobs create more rental demand than finance ones. His onstage zingers, The Promote noted, land less reliably than his market insights.