There is a moment in a family business when you realize the conversation has shifted. It used to be my father teaching me — about retail, about negotiating, about how to read a trade area. Then it became the two of us, side by side, working deals as colleagues. And now I look across the office and my son Avi is sitting at his own desk, taking calls, asking the same kinds of questions I asked twenty-five years ago.

Three generations of Schuckman Realty Inc. — Stanley, me, and Avi — all under one roof. It is, without question, one of the great privileges of my career.

What My Father Built

Stanley Schuckman founded this firm in 1978 with a simple idea: be the most knowledgeable retail real estate broker in the New York trade areas, treat every client like a long-term relationship, and never compromise on the work. Forty-eight years later, that thesis is still the foundation of everything we do.

Working alongside my father every day has been one of the great gifts of my career. He is now turning 82 this summer, and he is still in the office, still walking centers, still on calls with operators he has known for forty years. The reason this firm has been a leading retail real estate firm in the New York metropolitan area for nearly five decades is that he never stopped showing up — and he never stopped teaching the rest of us how to show up.

What the Third Generation Brings

When Avi joined the firm, the question I got most often was whether he would do things the way I did, or the way my father did. The honest answer is: neither. He is going to do them his own way — and that is the point.

What stays the same across the three generations is the discipline. Be in the market. Service the client. Tell the truth about the deal. Build relationships that outlast any one transaction. Those are not negotiable, and they will not change.

What changes is everything else. Avi is operating in a market with mobile-device foot traffic data, AI underwriting, and capital sources that did not exist when my father started the firm. He thinks about deal sourcing differently than I do. He approaches tenants differently. He has a different network. And that is exactly what a third generation is supposed to bring — the discipline of the first two generations combined with the instincts of the next era.

Why This Matters for Our Clients

A family business that is on its third generation is not common, and it is especially uncommon in commercial real estate brokerage. It means a few things for the people who hire us:

• Institutional memory that no firm can replicate. When my father remembers a deal he did on a particular corridor in 1986, that knowledge is in the room when we underwrite a new deal on the same corridor today.
• Long-term thinking, not next-quarter thinking. When you are building a firm to hand to your son, you do not chase the commission that costs you the relationship. We never have, and we never will.
• Continuity of service. The client who hired us in 1995 can still call my father today. The client who hires us in 2026 can build the same kind of relationship with Avi for the next forty years.
• Three perspectives on every deal. Stanley’s experience, my market knowledge, and Avi’s instincts on the next generation of tenants are all in the room when our team underwrites an opportunity. That is not a marketing line. It is how we actually work.

The Next Chapter

I do not know what Schuckman Realty will look like in 2050. I do know that the values that built it — the values my father modeled every day for nearly fifty years — are the values that will carry it forward. Avi will run the firm one day. He will hire and train the next generation of brokers. He will face market cycles that none of us can predict. And when he does, he will have the institutional memory of three generations of Schuckman brokers behind him.

That is the gift my father gave to me. It is the gift I am working every day to give to my son. And it is, ultimately, the value proposition we offer to every client who hires our firm.