Peakhill Capital and Ziegel Advisors Inc. have launched a national commercial real estate brokerage platform called Peakhill Commercial Realty.

The business is led by Jamie Ziegel as its chairman and national sales team lead. 

Ziegel has spent more than 35 years working in underwriting, brokerage, brokerage leadership and investment banking leadership for companies including Royal LePage Commercial, Cushman & Wakefield and TD Securities Real Estate Investment Banking Group, culminating in leading or participating in more than $50 billion in transactions. 

He founded Ziegel Advisors Inc. in 2023 to invest in and help develop next-generation business opportunities within the Canadian commercial real estate industry and offer strategic advisory and bespoke brokerage services to institutional and private real estate organizations.

A 'shared' start-up mentality

Ziegel had been making business presentations to a variety of companies and was impressed with Peakhill Capital after doing some for them, which convinced him they might be a good fit for this new venture.

Ziegel told RENX that Peakhill Capital chief executive officer Harley Gold “has a startup mentality. He's a doer, he's a builder and he got it immediately and wanted to do this with me, so that's how the joint venture was created.”

Toronto-based Peakhill Capital was founded in 2019 and provides commercial real estate investment, financing and advisory services across North America. It serves more than 500 borrower and developer clients across Canada and has deployed more than $21 billion in capital across the real estate capital stack. 

Colin Ross, who’s been president of Peakhill Realty since last December, is serving the same role with Peakhill Commercial Realty. The commercial real estate executive has more than 25 years of leadership experience across public companies, private equity and entrepreneurial platforms.

“Jamie is one of the most experienced and successful transaction professionals in Canadian commercial real estate, and throughout his career he has been known for challenging conventional thinking,” Gold said in a media release. 

“Jamie, Colin and I share the belief that there is both room and a need for a new brokerage model. By combining exceptional talent with technology, innovation and dedicated support, we believe we can deliver greater value to clients while creating a better platform for the industry's leading and emerging professionals.”

AI, Innovation and Marketing team

The core of Peakhill Commercial Realty is what it calls its national A.I.M. (AI, Innovation and Marketing) team, which brings underwriters, marketing professionals, software engineers and artificial intelligence specialists together to deliver an enhanced level of support — including client strategy development and off-market opportunity identification — to brokers across the country.

“It will be the centralized team that will service all of the salesforce that will service the clientele,” explained Ziegel. “We're taking a lot of what salespeople had to do in the past and doing it for them, which will allow them to focus on what they do best — which is client relationships, negotiating, human decision-making and the execution of deals.”

Investing significantly in this A.I.M. team should improve the consistency of service to clients and provide them with more value between deals, according to Ziegel.

“We're going to try to add value to our abilities to underwrite and organize to help our clients move forward and keep up with certain parts of the business that a brokerage underwriting team might be able to service but the clients wouldn't have quite the capacity to do because they're focused on their core competencies of asset management, ownership or whatever it is,” he said.

The intention isn’t to try and take over from legacy brokers, who Ziegel believes still play an important role in Canadian commercial real estate, but he thinks some things can be done better. 

“It's easier for a well-financed startup boutique to implement some of these changes quickly and challenge the model than it would be to do that from within a much older organization,” said Ziegel.

“We've got great brokerages out there and it's a great industry. I just think we have to keep evolving it.”

Covering $1M to institutional scale opportunities

Peakhill Commercial Realty will be involved in large and mid-sized transactions as well as smaller ones in the $1 million to $15 million range.

Peakhill Capital has more than 200 employees, including 45 originators, at its Toronto headquarters and offices in Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver and Minneapolis, Minn. It has added to its underwriting team and will bring in more sales agents as part of Peakhill Commercial Realty.

“Peakhill Capital does mortgage loans and construction financing for apartment buildings, retail and industrial, so they're already a service company,” said Ziegel. “They already have a massive underwriting team and a lot of AI implemented, so we're just adding another service line to that existing program.”

While Ziegel will continue to have personal investments in other young companies, his primary focus is now on Peakhill Commercial Realty.

“I want to take this time in my career to give back and help lead some change,” said Ziegel. “It can be done if you utilize the innovations available and get the right team surrounding you.”