Anthony Cohen of Northmarq: 5 Questions

Anthony Cohen of Northmarq: 5 Questions The J.P. Morgan alum is co-leader of the brokerage’s national net lease and sale-leaseback group By Isabelle Durso September 7, 2026 7:00 am reprintsNorthmarq’s Anthony Cohen is six years into his commercial real estate career and already holds top roles at a firm noted for its leasing, sales and debt acumen. Cohen, 34, is a managing director in Northmarq’s Los Angeles commercial investment sales office and co-leader of the firm’s national net-lease and sale-leaseback group. Since 2020 — when he started his real estate brokerage career at Ascension — Cohen has worked on deals with a cumulative volume exceeding $1 billion. His experience in both real estate and finance — he worked at J.P. Morgan for two years after college — make him a pro at advising businesses on their real estate needs. Cohen, who leads a team of five producers at Northmarq, said the most popular investment today is one that saves buyers money on taxes: accelerated depreciated assets like gas stations, car washes or even oil change sites. “Those are the most interesting and most highly sought-after assets right now,” he said. Commercial Observer sat down with Cohen last week to discuss that investment trend, his career so far, and what he’s seeing in the market today. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Commercial Observer: Walk me through how you got started in real estate and where you were before Northmarq. Anthony Cohen: So I’m not too young, but not too old. I went to Penn State. I studied finance. My first job was at J.P. Morgan. I was working just outside of Philadelphia in Delaware, actually, and I was a financial analyst there, and, you know, did really well. Even though I got all the accolades of being a high performer, it’s very corporate, and upward mobility compensation is very hard to change. You just have to put in the hours and the years, and you’ll eventually be moving up the ladder. It was a really good experience to learn how to become a professional in the outside world, but I wanted something that had unlimited potential. A friend of mine who was living in New York City at the time wanted to go after distressed debt-backed commercial real estate, and so I moved to New York and we worked together in a startup fashion, calling up local banks and regional banks to find out what loans were non-performing. We would find out if they were willing to sell them, and, if they were, we would call in debt funds and things like that, and buyers of distressed debt, and broker them. When I got there, there was basically zero revenue, and then we ended up brokering about $70 million of distressed debt in two years. I also helped a building get recapitalized as well, and that was my intro to real estate. Then I later started in this boutique net-lease company, where they were building out a role that was kind of perfect for what I was. It was finance and real estate. It was a broker to go after sale-leaseback deals. So, basically, working on deals that are in the context of M&A transactions. I had a really strong financial background through working at J.P. Morgan, and then I had some real estate background. It was really a combination of the two: helping businesses buy and sell, and advising on the real estate portion of that. I got my license at the end of 2019, so I’ve been a broker for six years. What are you working on right now? We’ve been working with a food manufacturer, and they were operating a building in Pennsylvania. The building that they were operating out of needed significant capex to increase manufacturing capacity there for their clients, and they had some really high-level blue chip clients that they had to service in the quick-service restaurant space. Basically, the capital required to revamp the space was close to $30 million, and so, for the seller, the landlord of the building, it was actually a perfect storm. They were looking to sell, and so they were able to buy the building for about $13 million, and I was able to find an investor to pay $28.5 million for it. They used the additional proceeds we generated from the sale to lower the equity amount they needed to invest in the capex post-closing. That was a solution we were able to provide that they couldn’t have before without using the real estate in a strategic way. They bought it and simultaneously sold the building, signed the 20-year lease, and got an additional $14 million to $15 million from the sale. What are the popular investments you’re seeing right now? The most active industry we’ve been working on in retail has been the gas station space. We do a lot of general C-store gas stations, the ones you see on the corner of every city block. But also we work on large travel centers, so we have a client that’s operating about 100-plus travel centers throughout the United States right now. When we first met them about 14 or 15 months ago, they were doing under $1 billion in revenue. This year, they’re going to be doing about $2.7 billion in revenue by the end of the year. We’ve probably done about $200 million in sale-leaseback transactions for them across multiple states and helped them grow. That’s one of our biggest clients and someone that we really saw a drastic change through growing through M&A, and so that’s been a really good client. It’s a really hot sector because gas stations have tax depreciation benefits for real estate professionals and people that have passive income. So it’s been a very sought-after asset. People who are tax planning want to buy more gas stations, either just a typical gas station or a travel center. We’ve sold those in almost every state — Texas, Colorado, Arizona, really everywhere. Generally speaking, buyers are looking at accelerated depreciation assets. If you buy a gas station, a car wash, some oil change sites, they have to meet certain criteria, but those assets allow for 100 percent depreciation in year one outside of land value. Those have been very popular because people are just looking for creative ways to save money on taxes. Speaking generally, I think those are the most interesting and most highly sought-after assets right now. And I think people are moving away from the Walgreens-type investments and CVSs because the outlook on pharmacy or how much space they’re going to need in the future is changing. What are you seeing in the multifamily market today? I don’t specialize in single-family homes. But I can tell you about Los Angeles because I live here. In Los Angeles, sellers are still holding price, but there are fewer buyers in the market, and the value has kept up. Generally speaking, in the big growth markets that we saw from COVID-19 — like Texas, Florida, Tennessee, maybe Virginia, and some other big growth markets — multifamily has struggled because what happened was everybody built new multifamily expecting rental rates to go up. While they were right that the population grew and it’s still growing in those markets, they built too many units, and so rental rates actually came down because there were a lot more units than there were people. Now that it’s expensive to build more units, that’s sort of catching up to each other. So probably multifamily will start doing better in those markets on a go-forward basis. Housing in L.A., which is where I live, is kind of set-held price, even though it’s fewer transactions. Just whoever is going to flinch first. People don’t want to take a lower price, and people don’t want to buy when the debt doesn’t make sense. It’s just been like, “Who’s gonna flinch first?” What are you looking for in the next year? I think it’ll be interesting to see if interest rates go down, how the market will react. We’ve been in this purgatory of high rates for two years now, three years. So I’m not counting on that. But it would be interesting to see how the market changes once that happens. Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.