Page 22 - RE-NJ

20 MAY 2025
Alex Narcise, partner-in-charge of Wiss’ real estate and construction services group,
spearheaded the fi rm’s search for new offi ce space before its move to Florham Park in 2020.
“It’s been a game changer,” he said.
“We want as many clients as we can
to get here, because you could tell
them the story about what we’re
about — and they feel it — but when
you get them here, it kind of ties it all
in to what we’re saying.”
Wiss has increasingly pitched its
advisory group to its commercial
real estate clients, including many of
the high-net-worth families that have
anchored the industry in New Jersey
for decades. The team is also helping
developers and property owners
implement technology to automate
day-to-day bookkeeping and other
tasks, including artifi cial intelligence,
in the interest of streamlining and
providing real-time data on their
businesses, rather than simply
reviewing fi nancial statements at the
end of every year.
The service has been especially
attractive to second- and third-
generation executives who want to
“propel the business forward” and
focus on new projects, Narcise said,
rather than worrying about internal
fi nance.
“A lot of times we’ll get into different
projects with clients and help
them structure their accounting
departments, make sure they’re
implementing all their technologies
and they understand the latest and
greatest that’s going on that applies
to a real estate family,” he said. “So
that’s been a fun part of it.”
That’s not to mention wealth
management, another growing
business for Wiss that can appeal
to real estate owners and other
entrepreneurs whose businesses span
multiple generations. The practice
has roughly $1 billion in assets under
management after launching in 2018,
he said, citing the importance of a
holistic platform and arguing that
“there’s really nothing in the client’s
lifecycle that we can’t really address
at this point.”
“This fi rm has been around a long
time,” Narcise said. “The nice part
about it is that we had a good
foundation of clients. But I would say,
probably in the last 10 years, these
other services have really taken off.
The market has really changed.”
Wiss expects to continue growing, he
said. He noted that accounting fi rms
have become increasingly attractive
to private equity, meaning there’s an
opportunity to recruit professionals
who may become disillusioned or
simply want more control over their
future.
“Culture means something,” Narcise
said. “And culture’s an overused term,
but it certainly means something
that people want to go to work
where they have friends and feel like
they’re comfortable and they can be
themselves.”
He added: “People still really
want that. So we’re getting a lot of
recruiting opportunities from people
that are coming out of these big fi rms
that are being acquired and (saying) ‘I
don’t really want that. I want a place
where I feel like it’s home.’” RE