Partners bring special touch to buildings.

Like many college graduates fresh out of school, David Levy wasn't exactly sure what he was going to do for a career when he was thrust into the ranks of the workaday crowd in the mid 80s.

Going back to work at an upstate sleep away camp where he had spent his summers during high school as a counselor probably wasn't his first choice. But when one of the camp's owners died suddenly from cancer and the other called with a plea for Levy's services, Levy couldn't turn him away and packed his bags for one last summer leading campers on jaunts in the forest.

If that good deed wasn't enough, when camp let out at summer's end, one of the many campers Levy befriended asked him if he'd attend a soccer game the camper was participating in on Long Island, where both Levy and the camper lived. That camper was Jeff Buslik, whose father Jim was a vice president at real estate firm, Helmsley Spear. Levy attended the game and his presence didn't go unnoticed; the elder Buslik offered him a job paving the way for what turned out to be an enduring partnership and nearly 20 years of success in commercial real estate brokerage.

"I did the right thing twice, agreeing to work at the camp and attending the soccer game and it paid off," Levy said. "I graduated college with a degree in economics which for me was like a degree in nothing, but when I got my start in real estate, things started coming together fast."

Mentoring under Buslik for almost a year at Helmsley Spear, Levy stuck with Buslik when he decided to stake out on his own, forming leasing firm James Buslik & Co. in 1990. Amid a sea of big fish, the pair quickly saw an opportunity to carve a niche by focusing on hard luck assignments, namely former manufacturing buildings whose odd floorplates and lack of amenities prevented their conversion to the kind of high end office space that would attract staple tenants such as law, marketing or advertising firms. The pair began working with one owner in particular, the Adams Company, helmed by Sydney Perlman and possessing a portfolio of buildings concentrated in the garment district., The properties were stagnating and leasing was down and some kind of creative angle was needed to drag the portfolio out from the perception of being just a collection of generic office properties, many of which would most likely be bested in competition with neighboring office stock.

Scrambling to come up with a plan, Buslik and Levy decided to reinvent most of Adams's buildings as specialty properties for certain industries.

Being in the Penn District, they focused on the garment industry and turned many of the buildings into showroom spaces including 463 Seventh Avenue, which became an outerwear center, and 42 West 39th Street, which was converted to house menswear tenants. Other industries soon found a home as well in Adams properties. 1115 Broadway became a toy building, 317 East 24th Street became a medical building, and 11 East 26th Street became a gift and home furnishings property.

Buslik and Levy's strategy worked better than even they could have imagined--and certainly better than Perlman might have expected--and most of the properties are now almost fully occupied.

"Once these buildings catch on in an industry, you get tenants lining up to get in," Buslik said. "Specialty buildings like these do well when times are good in real estate, but they also typically perform better than a lot of other straight office buildings when the market is down."

Creating Adams' specialty buildings took discipline on Buslik and Levy's part however, especially when the properties were hungry to sign leases.

"You have to stick to your guns and not dilute the building with tenants outside of the building's industry," Buslik said. "It's hard, especially when you want to get space filled in a garment building and you have a law firm eager to come in, but you have to keep the integrity of the building otherwise it loses its appeal as a specialty property, we're tough about that."

The duo's work proved so effective that Adams' owner invited Buslik and Levy to merge their firm with his own in 1998, forming Adams & Co., a company in which Buslik and Levy are now principals. The firm fuses Buslik and Levy's leasing with the Adams Company's strength in building management.