Biz
WCBJ ®
INSID DE E
WESTCHESTER COUNTY W
B BUSINESS JJOURNAL
YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS | westfaironline.com
February 11, 2013 | VOL. 49, No. 6
BROkERS BUSY IN THE mARkET ... FOR NEW JOBS
INSIDE
BY JOHN GOLDEN jgolden@westfairinc.com
C
EMPIRE CITY • 17
GOOD THINGS • 32
@
From left, Gregory V. Frisoli, Lawrence A. Ruggieri and Glenn Walsh.
ommercial real estate brokers Glenn Walsh and Lawrence A. Ruggieri are working this month from a temporary office at 800 Westchester Ave. in Rye Brook while their new office there is readied for occupancy. They’ll stay in the same RPW Group building from which they’ve worked on Westchester County office deals for several years at Cushman & Wakefield Inc. But the business cards they’ve handed out since January bear the logo of their former market rival, Newmark Grubb Knight Frank (NGKF). “It’s musical chairs,” one longtime office broker said of the recent flurry of moves by some top brokers and their deal-making teams between the top agencies in the Westchester and Fairfield County, Conn. markets. The outbreak of shop-swapping has made historical relics of several still-standing leasing agent signs at office parks on the Platinum Mile and elsewhere in the county. And it left Cushman & Wakefield (C&W) without its core of senior brokers and a large share of its business in Westchester. Brokers’ moves between firms are not uncommon – Walsh, for example, worked at CB Commercial Real Estate and did a 6-year Brokers, page 6
Expanding its home care turf BY JOHN GOLDEN jgolden@westfairinc.com
A 112-year-old home health agency in Westchester County is expanding its geographical reach and adding staff to meet new demand for its services in the nation’s and New York’s changing health care landscape. Based in White Plains, the former Visiting Nurse Services in Westchester & Putnam has been renamed VNS Westchester as it expands its Medicare-certified services this year to the Bronx, Rockland and Dutchess counties. The agency, the largest nonprofit, community-based home health care provider in Westchester, began serving Putnam County residents two years ago. Putnam
County sold the license to the agency for $250,000. The expansion, which already has led VNS Westchester to increase its skilled nursing staff by 10 percent since September, follows an approximately 20-year moratorium in New York on the creation of new certified home health agencies, said Elias M. Nemnom, president and CEO of VNS Westchester. The moratorium was lifted by the state Department of Health in late 2011, as the state began implementing measures recommended by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team to provide less costly and more efficient and coordinated longterm care for Medicaid patients needing more than 120 days of home care service and keep them out Home care, page 6
IT MIGHT HAVE CLOSED IN OCTOBER, BUT THE PEEKSKILL THEATER STILL HAD ITS MARQUEE LIT ON FEB. 5. • 8