In this episode of Brokers Angle, Hal Coopersmith sits down with Kirill Azovtsev, whose story is a compelling tale of perseverance, adaptability, and success against the odds. Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Kirill arrived in the U.S. on a tennis scholarship, barely speaking English and with no prior exposure to American culture or business. What began as a leap of faith into an unfamiliar country eventually turned into a thriving career in New York City, one of the world’s most competitive real estate markets.

Transcript

Hal Coopersmith: Welcome to Brokers Angle. I’m Hal Coopersmith. We are speaking to Kirill Azovtsev. Welcome to the podcast, Kirill.

Kirill Azovtsev: Thank you so much for having me.

Hal Coopersmith: So we were talking beforehand, you have a very interesting story about coming to the US and how you got into brokerage. How did, how did all this come to be?

Kirill Azovtsev: Well, it was a little bit of a long story. Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. I moved here in 2004 on a tennis scholarship. Came here for the first time 2004. Never been to the States before. Came here to play tennis, essentially, go to school, learn English. Did not really know English that well.

Hal Coopersmith: You came here not knowing English.

Kirill Azovtsev: No, it was a little bit, I knew words. I could piece them together, but I still was afraid to say a sentence or afraid to say the words out loud. So anyway, it took me a while. Studied, played tennis. Lots of tournaments. Got into in the summers to teaching tennis to make some money on the side to try to make a living. And then, did four years. And one of my, tennis clients, was in real estate and I did not know what I wanted to do. And I essentially kind of throughout real estate as an idea. And he was there and he was listening to what, what I was saying, and he said, look, we should talk. Come into my office and I’ll tell you what it is about. And I obviously had no idea what real estate is and what that incorporates. So gave me my first job after two weeks of sitting down with him. And this was 2008. So the market wasn’t too hot to say the least, right? The market was crashing, but I, started, I learned a lot. I started on like a property management side. They own a bunch of buildings. So I was doing leasing for, the ownership side. So I learned a lot. 2008 crashed. They did a big round of layoffs. I went back to teaching tennis for a few weeks, and then one of my other tennis clients were like, oh, I thought, you’re, in real estate.

What are you doing here? And I said, got laid off. And so she said, I know somebody who has a small firm that focuses on tenant representation. They’re always looking for guys that would be in business development and make cold calls and send out emails. And so I met with them, just called them cold, called them, went in and met with them and, they said, job’s, yours, here’s the desk, here’s the phone, and go generate leads. So I did, I did that for about a year and a half. I studied at NYU in parallel to get my real estate kind of education up to understand it a little bit better. So started at NYU for about a year and then while I was at NYU, one of my professors who I became really friendly with happened to be a real estate attorney, office leasing attorney. And he became my mentor. And I spent a lot of time with him just talking about my future, talking about where I wanted my career to go. And he said, look, you have to go to one of the bigger firms to learn and build up your career there. And so I started interviewing with the big five firms that exist in New York. And then I landed at JLL, and spent about 10 years at JLL and about four and a half years ago we came over to Savills with my business partner, Jim Wink, and have been building our business and team since.

Hal Coopersmith: So what was it like? You talked about it, but you came to the US not knowing English, not knowing presumably much about the United States. Now you have to learn just a whole new culture and then everything about real estate. What was that like?

Kirill Azovtsev: Yeah, the culture shock was pretty significant. I mean, everything was different from how you get your cell phone, how you pay your cell phone bill, how you load up a washing machine or drying machine. So that took a little while. How you approach people, all of that I needed to learn. I think the positive thing was that I had tennis. Tennis was my way of communicating with people because I was at first surrounded with people that are in a tennis world. So, that was helpful. I’ve met a lot of people that way and I have to say that all of the people that I’ve met early on in my journey here, have been very friendly. I think that that helped me learn the language a little bit faster. People said it’s okay to make a mistake. It’s okay to say two wrong words together and we will help you navigate through that and we’ll tell you if that was a mistake or you should have said differently.

So I was always, I always welcomed, criticism or suggestion or an opinion on how to do something different or how to say something different. So that was a really important part. And I also did not have anybody to speak Russian to. So I sort of, I was emerged into New York, into, America English language and I, was forced to speak it. Most of the folks that immigrate here, they have their families or they have their friends that they immigrated here together and they always fall back into or to speaking their own language. So. I didn’t have that, and had to learn it quick. As it relates to real estate, I quickly realized that I liked it and that I wanted to know more about it, and I wanted to become an expert in it. And it all started with, me kind of just going out on the streets. And learning the buildings, understanding what the buildings lobbyists look like, learning the building addresses, learning the large tenants in the buildings. And in the beginning it was hard to put it all together, but then I started realizing, oh my God, these are large companies that are in there that service these massive clients and the person that owns this building built it all himself, and he took this building out of the ground and built it into a skyscraper. To me, that was always fascinating. So I sort of started to really like it in the early days of my career, and I just wanted to learn more and I wanted to. It kind of become the best at my craft and become someone who people can trust with their real estate decisions one day because back then I couldn’t see it, but I wanted it.

Hal Coopersmith: I love your idea of becoming the best in the craft and also that you connected real estate to tennis. We talked a little bit about rejection before recording, and one of the things just connecting the two, I think it was Roger Federer who said, one of the best tennis players, that he won, correct me if I’m wrong, 55% of his points.

Kirill Azovtsev: That’s absolutely right.

Hal Coopersmith: That the margin between being the best, was five points. Five percentage points. So can you talk about how tennis as a sport and excelling at tennis has prepared you for the rejection and everything that comes with real estate?

Kirill Azovtsev: It’s a great point about Roger. I grew up watching Federer play and he was always my idol, on how he behaved on the court and how he played and how he took his losses. Because to your point, it seems like he was dominating the game for a really long time, but if you bring it all down, it was just small margins that he won on and the matches that he won mattered at the right time when it’s a grand slam. To me, I always thought about our business as a lifestyle, and the lifestyle and or a sport. To me, I’ve always connected tennis to real estate because to me, every day I wake up, I’m preparing for a match that’s going to advance me to the next round, and hopefully that next day is going to advance me to the next round. And then one day you’ll hopefully win a tournament, which to me translates into successfully closing a deal for a client and they’re happy, and everybody is happy at the end of the day.

I grew up playing competitively, played a lot of tournaments, played a lot of, various players, and I’ve lost a lot. And in tennis, you’re on the court by yourself and the mistake that you make it’s on you 100%. So you have to quickly, in order to not lose momentum, which could happen very quickly in a tennis game, you have to quickly shake off the loss. You have to quickly say, okay, I missed the ball let me recollaborate, fix whatever I did wrong and move on to the next point. Right. And just quickly leave it behind. So that to me was always, relevant to what I was doing in business. Because a lot of, in my early days was cold calling. It was called emailing. Walking in the offices in the early days when, it was still semi acceptable. I was walking into offices and asking for people and asking to meet with people, and try to make connections. So I was okay with getting rejected from somebody or somebody who I never knew. As long as I took the shot and in my head, I went for it, and even though they said no, at least I tried and I can move on, in my head.

Hal Coopersmith: So talk about your focus.

Kirill Azovtsev: So in the morning, what I try to do, usually when I start, I take my dog for a walk. I do a quick workout and I always get in the office, try to get in the office early. I’m in office type of person. And as soon as I kind of step into the office, I just feel like it just focuses me on the things that I need to be doing. And usually in the morning that’s my offense time when I tackle the hardest kind of tasks of my day. So whether it’s business development stuff, whether it’s presentations, that we have that morning, I try to schedule it for the morning ’cause, feels like that’s the most, kind of energy full time, or I start getting after stuff, the prospects that I need to get to. So my focus has always been kind of just get a workout in, in the morning, get your kind of morning started, with energy and get in the office and start kind of focusing around the business that you have. And note keeping to me has been really important to make sure that you know what you’re going after and what your day would look like. So writing everything down and kind of working off of that schedule of that plan.

Hal Coopersmith: So organizing your day start to finish.

Kirill Azovtsev: Yes, for sure. If it’s not on my calendar, I’m not doing it. So I try to get everything on a calendar as well.

Hal Coopersmith: So, can you talk about how that is translated into focus in your business and what you do focus on in your business?

Kirill Azovtsev: So, the primary focus in our business is on representing tenants, I would say 70% of our business is in New York and the 30% of our business is outside of New York. So we help our clients on a national and global basis. Focus is on high growth companies, technology companies, financial services, advertising companies that’s kind of been our focus historically through my career. But we’ve done work with law firms, nonprofits, and many others. So I think focusing and having a niche just on tenant representation and it’s primarily Midtown, Midtown South is where bulk of our business is, has been really, beneficial for our business.

Hal Coopersmith: Can you talk a little bit about how you’re getting your business?

Kirill Azovtsev: That is the hardest part of our business, and kind of getting the new opportunities and getting in front of people. I’ll start by saying that the way I look at our business and business development is that it has to come off natural. And that’s why I kind of see this business as a lifestyle business. So the people that you’re always kind of with, hopefully you can get friendly with them and hopefully you can make friends and then hopefully that transitions into some sort of business or an introductions that they can make for you. So that aside, cold calling is still out there, still really important. I do it all the time. Cold emailing with ideas, with good thoughts, or some market information that may be relevant to the prospect you’re reaching out to. So just cold business development. I feel like that is still a very, very big part of brokers of my day. I feel like cold calling is not as prominent as it used to be. But I try to spend a good amount of time on that. Then relationship building, going out to lunches with people, going out to dinners with people, being in front of people, going to the events, that are more a little bit more targeted, that have targeted audience, that have people that you know you want to meet. Playing sports. I play tennis, I play squash. I play golf. I’m out there, all the time. LinkedIn has also been, with all the technology that’s out there with AI and Chatgpt, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and other websites so you can get information on potential prospects that you’re trying to get to.

So there is no reason for you to make a call or an outreach and not be prepared and know everything about a specific company or an individual that you try to reach out. So the person on the other side is taking that cold call or cold outreach from the angle of, Hey, this person prepared, this person did some research. This person wants to add value to me. I think just kind of focusing on really getting to targeted people with good information and doing that consistently is where I found the most success, is building a report, even if it’s an email chain that you’re trying to get to somebody, following that with the call, building a report online counts because then the person may respond and say. You know what? I’ve been busy, but I’ve been meaning to respond to you. And so usually that transitions into a warmer introduction versus a cold. And the goal, my punchline, is that the goal is to make the outreach, make the cold call and find a way to warm it up. Find a way to deliver the information that is not cold, that it’s warm information and you have mutual connections or you have some really good information that you want to share. So, cold outreach, that’s how I built every piece of business that I’ve worked on.

Hal Coopersmith: So can you talk about how you took some cold outreach that you mentioned, warmed it up, you don’t have to name names, and how it translated into something.

Kirill Azovtsev: The most recent sort of success story for us is a company that, very well known brand and we found out that they’re hiring a lot of people. They have an expiring lease situation. We happen to know almost everything about the building that they were in, and we’ve compiled a lot of information together and it was actually done within our team. So we divided and conquer. We figured out if there’s somebody that we know at the company, they’re going to attack this person. I will attack this person. This person is going to go try to get to that person. And so we divided and conquer because it was an opportunity that we really wanted, and we got to the right person completely cold. We arranged kind of a formal introduction in person. They told us what the need was and what their issue was in the building that they were in, which was that they could not grow. They were sandwiched between multiple large tenants that both were either going to take their space and/or would take everything that would become available.

So the future growth for that tenant in that building was going to be really hard. And so they kind of gave us a loose order to say this is what we need and go find it for us. And we want to find something that is built, that is furnished, that is wired, and we don’t want to spend any capital building it, we want a long-term deal and we don’t want to pay anything, wouldn’t want really competitive rates and in a very kind of specific area. So our job as brokers is to know everything that’s going on in the market. Everything is going on in the building and the surrounding buildings, around a tenant. So we put our heads together. We figured out if there’s any shadow space that could potentially become available and or other larger companies or mid-size companies that potentially would be given up space. And so we uncovered a really interesting opportunity was completely off market. We got to the bottom of it very quickly and we figured out if that would be a match. And we presented it, we packaged everything up to our client and made a super detailed kind of presentation on why this could make a lot of sense for them to even consider this as an option before even touring it. They appreciated our approach very much and welcomed the opportunity to go and see it and feel it out. And so they did. The requirement quickly grew from one floor to two floors to then three floors. It ended up being a really good win for our team, for all of us. And at the end of the day the client was thrilled that they were able to secure a really kind of good long-term deal that aligned with their company’s future and business plan.

Hal Coopersmith: I feel, based off of your story and your history, how you’ve built your business and name in brokerage that you would have good advice to younger brokers. What advice do you have?

Kirill Azovtsev: A couple of thoughts. Number one is think really hard before you getting into this industry. It kind of has this glamorous look on the outside, but at the end of the day it’s a pretty hard, very competitive business. And I think New York City is the most competitive space that you can be in. So learning the market, understanding the buildings. And what I mean by that is understanding building shapes, what lobbies look like, who were the major tenants, who were the owners, who were the previous owners. Kind of debt structure is on the building. How is the building being financed, how is the building is going to be financed in the future. So learning everything about the market because most of the younger folks that start in our business, they’re kind of just thrown into deals and working on them and running surveys and putting some presentations together and doing some research. That’s all good and that will happen. But I think what I’m seeing a lot is that the actual knowledge of the real estate is not being looked at as well as it could be.

So first advice would be to learn everything about the real estate market. And it doesn’t have to be every single building, but it has to be the major buildings that someone could point to and say what is that building? And you should be able to answer? And you should be able to know what, or at least have a high level story about the building. Starting with Midtown. The second one is that I would totally focus on the business development side of the business. Making cold calls, doing cold outreach, just trying to generate  opportunities. I think, again, a lot of folks, younger folks start in the business and they think, you know. I am going to be brought into the deals and I’m going to be working on deals and or, the opportunities are going to flow in. It’s not the case. Well, at least wasn’t the case for me. And developing business always puts you in a beneficial position as you grow in your career, right? Because you always have value to add. You always have something to bring to the table, which is the most important thing. And the more you could do that, the more success and quicker success you’re going to have. And the third thing would be that, is if you want to be in this business and you like the real estate side of things, you also have to get a little  patient. It’s very different from other businesses, in my opinion, is that it’s gonna take you three years to ramp up and everybody kind of starts and says, I know it’s three years, but I’ll ramp up in a year, or I’ll ramp up in two years. And it always seems like it’s possible on paper, but at the end of the day, really to try to turn the corner, it it’s three years.

So have to be patient and almost, have a second job or have another way of working, maybe it’s working at a restaurant and really kind of rolling up your sleeves and meeting people that way. But having something, some mechanism where you can make some extra money on the side, but also be networking with people and meeting people and even though they’re young people that you may be meeting still those folks will grow up one day and become your friends and relationships in the future. So those would be my top three.

Hal Coopersmith: That is a wonderful note to end things on, Kirill Azovtsev thank you for being a part of Broker’s Angle.

Kirill Azovtsev: Appreciate your time. Thanks so much Hal.