Cushman & Wakefield chairman of NY investment sales Bob Knakal says right now is simply the best market he’s seen in his 32 years in the business. It’s among the reasons we’re excited to host our NY State of the Market event this Thursday at 4 Times Square, starting at 7am.

Bob tells us that NYC investment sales are on pace to hit a record this year with around $75B in transactions throughout the city, excluding Staten Island. In the first three quarters of the year, the number was about $56B, he says. To put that in perspective, last year’s year-end total was about $58B. Bob says if investment sales keep the pace they’re on, they’ll shatter the city’s previous year-end record of $62B, set at the peak of the last cycle, in 2007.

In this robust market, it’s getting easier for dealmakers to find deals and move on them. A WSJ article recently pegged the sector for an estimated $1.4B in investment just this year. Reonomy CEO Richard Sarkis (pictured, also on the bill to speak) sums up the evolution of commercial real estate tech as a three-phase process. The first wave involved researchers manually combing records and finding data in places like city records for end users to find buildings that might be for sale or to check on stats like when they last changed hands. The next wave brought in the element of cloud computing and data mining to speed up the same basic process. Rich says the wave that Reonomy’s aiming to pioneer is about helping end users harness what those mountains of data actually mean and turn that into value. He likens it to what E-Trade did for stocks.

Rich says the exact group of people he thought would hate his new commercial real estate tech platform when it launched last year—brokers—are some of its biggest fans. You still need the human element, and Rich says this was borne out by the experience of putting the platform into the hands of brokers, lenders, investors, research teams...even reporters (we on Bisnow’s NY-based editorial team recently started using it). When you don’t have to spend big chunks of time in front of Excel spreadsheets, you can get out and talk to clients more and do it armed with data that helps you add value, Rich says. Wanna learn more? Please join us on Thursday for our NY State of the Market event at 4 Times Square, starting at 7am. Sign up here!

Pictured: Reonomy's Manhattan HQ