Crexi's Conversation with the Chairman | September 2026

Conversation with the Chairman: Baseball, Brokerage, and the Numbers Behind the Game

For more than four decades, Bob Knakal has been one of America’s most prolific investment sales brokers. But anyone who knows Knakal also knows that another passion has followed him throughout his life: baseball.

A former college baseball player and lifelong student of the game, Knakal has long believed there are striking similarities between baseball and commercial real estate brokerage. Both are obsessed with statistics. Both reward preparation and repetition. Both involve prolonged periods of failure punctuated by moments of success. And in both, the numbers are extraordinarily important—but they never tell the entire story.

That connection even extends to Knakal’s unusual business card, which is modeled after a traditional baseball card and lists his career real estate statistics on the back.

For this installment of Crexi’s Conversation with the Chairman, we sat down with Bob to talk about baseball, brokerage, statistics, failure, consistency, and what America’s pastime can teach us about becoming great at the business of selling buildings.

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1. Crexi: Bob, anyone who knows you knows how much you love baseball. Where did that start, and why do you think the game has had such a lasting impact on the way you approach business?

Knakal: I have loved baseball for as long as I can remember, and one of the things I loved most about it was the statistics.

When I was a kid playing Little League, I kept track of my own statistics. Batting average, hits, runs, RBIs—I loved knowing the numbers. I played baseball through college, and that fascination with statistics never left me.

Baseball is probably the most statistically obsessed sport ever invented. You can look at a player's career and understand an enormous amount about what happened simply by studying the back of his baseball card.

How many games did he play? How many at-bats?

When I got into commercial real estate in 1984, I naturally started looking at the business the same way.

How many owners did I call? How many meetings did I get? How many valuations did I perform? How many exclusives did I sign? How many buildings did I sell? What was the dollar volume? What percentage of my exclusive listings actually sold?

Over 42 years, I have sold 2,425 buildings with an aggregate value of nearly $25 billion. That works out to roughly 1.1 buildings sold every week for my entire career and approximately $11 million of sales volume per week.

I don't look at those numbers simply as accomplishments. I look at them as statistics.

They are my box score.

And just like baseball statistics, they help me understand what I have done, what has worked, where I can improve, and what I need to do next.

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2. Crexi: Your business card is famously designed like Topps baseball cards, with your career statistics on the back. How did that idea come about?

Knakal: It actually came out of a problem.

Years ago, after I had changed firms, I ran into a longtime client who didn't realize I had moved. That bothered me because if somebody who knew me well didn't know where I was working, I clearly wasn't doing a good enough job communicating.

I started thinking about how I could create a business card that people wouldn't throw away. And I thought about baseball cards.

As a kid, you didn't throw away a baseball card. You looked at it. You flipped it over. You studied the statistics.  You compared one player with another. And if it was one of your favorite players, you kept it.

So I created a business card modeled after a Topps baseball card. My picture was on the front, and my career real estate statistics were on the back.

The card was an 8½-by-11-inch baseball card printed on heavy cardboard stock. I patterned it after the Topps 1970 version, which was the year I started collecting in earnest. I love that set. Eventually, the card became known around the country and its notoriety became bigger and bigger. I have now done four versions, most recently the landscape version of the 1956 Topps variety. That's my business card today.

People laugh when I hand it to them, but that's the point. They remember it.

There is also a deeper message behind it. I believe strongly that professionals should keep score.

If you claim expertise, there should be evidence supporting that claim.

I can tell someone that I know the New York City investment sales market, or I can show them what I have actually done over four decades.  The baseball card does that in a memorable way.

And every year, the statistics change. That's another thing I love about it. The card is never finished because the career isn't finished. I anticipate doing many more of these in the future.

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3. Crexi: Baseball is a game in which even the greatest players fail most of the time. Is that one of the parallels you see with brokerage?

Knakal:  Absolutely.  It may be the most important parallel of all.

Think about what constitutes greatness in baseball. If you get a hit three out of every ten at-bats over a long career, you're an outstanding hitter. If you hit .300 for 20 years, you're probably having a Hall of Fame conversation.

That means you can fail 70% of the time and still be considered great. Brokerage isn't very different.

You make hundreds of calls and many people don't call you back. You pitch assignments you don't win. You market properties that don't sell. Buyers tell you they're interested and disappear. Deals fall apart. Clients decide not to sell. Competitors beat you.

If you interpret every one of those events as a personal failure, this business will destroy you emotionally. The key is understanding that every at-bat is part of a much larger season.

I have sold 2,425 buildings, but imagine how many buildings I didn't sell during those 42 years. Imagine how many pitches I lost, or how many owners told me no. Imagine how many phone calls went unanswered.

Nobody puts those statistics on the back of the card. But they are every bit as responsible for the statistics that are there.

The best baseball players develop an ability to go 0-for-4, come back the next day and believe completely that they're going to get a hit.

Great brokers have to develop exactly the same mentality. Yesterday's strikeout has nothing to do with today's at-bat.

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4. Crexi: You have always been known for your focus on data. How much of that comes from baseball?

Knakal:  Probably more than I realized when I was younger.

I love statistics because statistics create context.

In baseball, saying a player had 180 hits means something. But knowing he had 180 hits in 550 at-bats tells you much more. Knowing what the league average was tells you more still. Whether he played in Yankee Stadium or Dodger Stadium, whether he faced left-handed or right-handed pitching, and what era he played in adds even more context.

Real estate works exactly the same way. A development site sold for $500 per buildable square foot. Okay. What does that mean?

Was it residential? Condo? Rental? Hotel? What was the zoning? Was it a corner? Was there demolition required? Was there contamination? Were there tenants? What were interest rates? What were construction costs? What was the market doing at the time?

A statistic without context can be dangerous.

That philosophy is a major reason we created the Knakal Land Index. We have assembled data on thousands of Manhattan development site transactions and are studying the relationships between land values and dozens of different variables.

We have found, for example, that seemingly simple characteristics can have measurable effects on value. A corner location for a condominium development site can create a meaningful premium.

But the statistic is only the beginning. The key question is: Why?

Statistics tell you what happened. Expertise helps explain why it happened. Judgment helps you decide whether it will happen again.

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5. Crexi: Baseball has gone through its own analytics revolution with sabermetrics. Commercial real estate is becoming increasingly data-driven as well. Can the industry become too dependent on numbers?

Knakal: Absolutely.

I love data. I probably love data more than almost anybody in our business. But I also believe people can develop a false sense of certainty from numbers.

Baseball experienced this with the analytics revolution.

Analytics revealed things that traditional baseball people had overlooked for generations. Front offices became smarter about evaluating players, defensive positioning, launch angles, pitch selection, and dozens of other variables.

That was incredibly valuable. But baseball is still played by human beings.

A spreadsheet doesn't know that a player is exhausted, that he's playing through an injury, that he's having trouble at home, or that he performs differently when there are 50,000 people screaming in October. Commercial real estate has the same limitation.

AI and data analytics are going to dramatically improve our industry. I'm a huge believer in both. But a model doesn't sit across the table from a 78-year-old owner whose family has owned a building for three generations.

It doesn't understand that the highest bidder may be the least likely buyer to close.

It doesn't necessarily know that a developer who paid aggressively for three sites last year has changed strategy because his lender pulled back.

Those are human variables. So I think the future belongs to people who can combine both. The numbers make your judgment better. But the numbers do not replace judgment.

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6. Crexi: Another baseball concept you frequently reference is consistency. What does a 42-year career teach you about playing a long season?

Knakal:  Baseball has always rewarded consistency.

Every year there are players who have incredible Aprils. Someone hits .400 for three weeks and everyone starts talking about him.

Then September comes. The great players are the ones who are still producing after 162 games. Brokerage is exactly like that.

Anyone can have a great month. Someone can land a huge assignment or close a massive transaction and suddenly look like a superstar.

But what happens next year? And the year after that? And ten years after that?

I started in this business in 1984. Over the course of my career, I have worked through the Savings & Loan Crisis, the early-1990s recession, the dot-com crash, September 11, the Global Financial Crisis, COVID, rapidly rising interest rates, and some of the most significant regulatory changes New York City real estate has ever experienced.

The conditions constantly changed. The fundamentals didn't.

Prospect every day. Know your market. Tell clients the truth. Do what you say you're going to do. Follow up. Keep learning. Work harder on your weaknesses. Treat people well. Then wake up tomorrow and do it again. Baseball players call them fundamentals for a reason. You don't graduate from fundamentals. The Hall of Famer still takes batting practice.

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7. Crexi: If you were coaching a young broker the way a baseball manager coaches a young player, what statistics would you tell them to track?

Knakal: I would tell them to track the statistics they can control before worrying about the statistics they can't.

Young brokers naturally want to track commissions. That's the equivalent of staring at the scoreboard. The scoreboard matters, but staring at it doesn't change the score.

Instead, track your at-bats. How many owners did you call today? How many substantive conversations did you have? How many meetings did you schedule? How many valuations did you deliver? How many follow-ups did you make? How many potential sellers are in your pipeline? How much time did you spend studying your market?

Those are the statistics that eventually produce the statistics everybody wants.

I have always believed there is tremendous power in understanding the relationship between activity and results. If I know that a certain number of calls historically creates a certain number of conversations, which creates a certain number of meetings, which creates a certain number of exclusives, then I can work backward from the outcome I want.

That's incredibly empowering, because now success isn't some mysterious thing that happens to talented people. It becomes a process.

And there is one final baseball lesson I would give every young broker. You are going to strike out. You're going to have slumps. You're going to have seasons when nothing seems to go your way.

Keep swinging.

Over 42 years, I've learned that careers aren't defined by one transaction, one year, or even one market cycle. They're defined by what you do over thousands and thousands of at-bats.

Eventually, the back of the baseball card tells the story. And I'm still adding statistics to mine.

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8. Crexi: In baseball, having access to better statistics can give a team a competitive advantage. In commercial real estate, platforms like Crexi are putting more data, listings, and market intelligence directly into the hands of brokers and investors.

How do you think that changes the brokerage business?

Knakal: I think it is a tremendous development for our industry, and I believe we are still in the early stages of understanding how powerful it can become.

One of the things I love about baseball is that the information is accessible. You can look at a player's statistics, compare him to other players, understand historical performance, and start making more informed decisions. Commercial real estate is moving in that direction.

A platform like Crexi brings an enormous amount of information together in one place. You can see what is being offered, understand how properties are being positioned, identify who is active in different markets, and get a much broader sense of what is happening outside of your immediate sphere of influence. That is incredibly valuable.

I also think Crexi has changed the concept of market reach. Historically, a broker's universe was largely defined by the people they personally knew. Today, technology can dramatically expand that universe. A property in New York can be discovered by an investor in Texas, Florida, California, or anywhere else in the country who may have a very specific reason for wanting to buy that particular asset.

For a seller, that is enormously important.

You don't necessarily need 100 buyers. You need to find the right buyer. And sometimes the buyer who creates the most value for a seller is the person you didn't know existed.

That's one of the reasons I think platforms like Crexi are so important to the evolution of our business. They make the market more transparent, expand the universe of participants, and allow information to move much more quickly.