Houlihan goes shopping

Thanks to the turmoil on Wall Street, boutiques and other smaller firms are in the catbird seat when it comes to picking up bulge-bracket talent. "You can bet that every independent firm is out having conversations and thinking of hiring people, says Rolfe "Rik" Kopelan, a managing partner at Capstone Partnership, a New York executive search firm. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime hiring opportunity for them."

One firm not letting that opportunity pass is Houlihan, Lokey, Howard & Zukin Inc. The Los Angeles-based shop recently snapped up a team of four from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. for its real estate investment banking group. J.P. Morgan may be weathering the credit storm, but Houlihan's new recruits say they were looking for a shop with more of a middle-market focus.

"J.P. Morgan's platform was primarily focused on large transactions and was primarily driven by big public companies," says Gary Gordon, a Houlihan managing director who spent 25 years at J.P. Morgan and its predecessors. "We just felt the business that we were running at J.P. Morgan was not really the primary focal point of the business. Our focus was on middle-market transactions."

Joining Houlihan with Gordon are senior vice presidents John Kenyon and Patrick Gillan and associate Harshad Mehta.

At J.P. Morgan, Gordon and his team oversaw the sales of New York's 650 Madison Ave. for $680 million and of 75 Wall St. -- the former downtown headquarters of J.P. Morgan Chase. The group also advised the Port Authority of New York on strategic options for the World Trade Center. They will remain in New York and report to Jonathan Geanakos and John Schoenfeld, co-heads of Houlihan's real estate, lodging and leisure group.

Geanakos joined Houlihan last year from Trammell Crow Co., a real estate development and investment firm. He and Gordon met when Trammell was hired to co-advise J.P. Morgan on its corporate real estate options. "The chemistry was great; we complemented each other," says Gordon, who majored in economics at the State University of New York at Binghamton and earned a masters in urban planning at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Jon was building the platform out at Houlihan, and we felt that within the middle-market space, there's a niche opportunity that many of the firms out there failed to concentrate on."

Geanakos, for his part, plans to keep expanding his group, which has 16 professionals in New York and Los Angeles. "We don't like to see bad things happen to other investment banks in this market, but it's a wonderful opportunity for us to expand our footprint," he says. "We are speaking with a lot of banking professionals and are on the lookout for great stars. Gary and his team were a tactical and strategic fit."