The four-story, Art Deco hotel sits at 1680 Collins Avenue across the street from National, Delano and Sagamore oceanfront resorts. The 31,033-square-foot San Juan Hotel was originally built in 1948. Florida corporate state records list the hotel’s owner as entities tied to the Gilani family. 

The expansion would rise on the western portion of the 0.4-acre site, facing James Avenue. The proposed plan would increase the number of rooms from 75 to 104 and expande the building’s footprint to 44,755 square feet. Of the existing 75 hotel rooms, 31 will be demolished and rebuilt, while 27 will be restored.

The historic facade will remain, too. The expansion is compatible with development and construction limits imposed by the Museum Historic Preservation District and the Miami Beach Architectural District, per the filing to the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board, which will hear the application April 14.

As part of the development plan, the neighboring liquor store would be redeveloped into restaurant space and a garden. (Attorney Michael Larkin of Bercow Radell Fernandez Larkin & Tapanes, the lawyer representing the owners, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

If approved, the plan would be the latest hospitality redevelopment on the block. The owners of the Ritz-Carlton plan to add a 15-story condo tower. The Delano hotel is preparing to reopen this year after closing in 2020 for an extensive renovation.

Julia Echikson can be reached at [email protected].  

Hosted by CO’s Editor in Chief Max Gross, in collaboration with the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), this annual confab joined some of the city’s most prominent business and civic leaders.

“This event not only serves as a definitive State of the Union event for New York and its real estate industry, but offers very candid insights from the real estate executives and policymakers that are directing the future of New York,” Gross said in his opening remarks. “Today, you’ll hear from real estate and policy experts on everything from how the industry is working to build on momentum for economic growth in the new mayoral administration, to how many developments like 350 Park Avenue are transforming our New York City skyline.”

The event kicked off with welcoming remarks from James Whelan, president of REBNY, who noted the strong recovery in the real estate market post-COVID and the enormous need for more rental housing in a city with a vacancy rate at or below 2 percent. Whelan also noted the need for commercial real estate-specific policies from state and local elected officials. 

“The policies coming out of City Hall, as well as the policies coming out of Albany, will go a long way to determining how our commercial and residential sectors perform moving forward,” Whelan said. “Such policies will determine whether such sectors experience growth, attract investment, and generate increasing amounts of tax revenue to pay for vital government services.” 

One particular policy that pretty much every speaker across the six panels agreed on was that the state’s 485x tax abatement program, developed to incentivize affordable housing development across the city, doesn’t work because of its strict construction wage rules for projects of 100 units or more. To get around the wage requirements, developers are building residential buildings with 99 or fewer units, speakers noted. 

In one session — which featured speakers Ken Fisher of the law firm Cozen O’Connor; Leila Bozorg, New York’s deputy mayor for housing and planning; Jed Walentas, CEO of Two Trees Management and REBNY chair; and Lisa Gomez, CEO at L+M Development Partners — Walentas held nothing back when expressing his opinion that 485x won’t get the job done.

 “The 485x program does not work. Generating a whole bunch of 99-unit projects and having the market decide that that’s what they’re willing to invest in is not a solution for New York City housing,” Walentas said. “Our industry, with City Hall, with the governor’s office, with the legislature, needs to fix that with organized labor, with all the other constituencies, whoever it is — we need to come up with a program that works.”

Adam Greene, executive vice president of development at owner RXR, agreed with Walentas’s take on 485x when he spoke on a panel later that morning. Greene was joined by Keith DeCoster, vice president of market data and policy at REBNY; Michael Hershman, CEO of owner Soloviev Group; Bruce Mosler, chairman of global brokerage at Cushman & Wakefield; and Mitch Korbey, partner and chair of the land use and zoning group at law firm Herrick, who moderated the talk. 

Greene did note that the 467m tax program, which incentivizes office-to-residential conversions, has been a boon for the city. But he and the panelists agreed that conversions alone aren’t enough to solve the city’s housing supply issues. 

Later in the day, Shimon Shkury, president and founder of Ariel Property Advisors, reiterated those sentiments about 485x and 467m. Shkury was speaking on an affordability and talent pipeline in a New York-focused panel with Karen Hu, principal and head of development at Camber Property Group; Bryan Kelly, president of development at Gotham Organization; Christina Rausch, executive vice president of real estate transaction services for the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC); and Marissa Schaffer, director at developer Msquared. David Shamshovich, a partner at law firm Belkin Burden Goldman, moderated. 

“485x needs to be changed,” Shkury said. “The wage requirement that is there now [should be] moved away to allow for larger construction. 467m is a fantastic tool, and we saw a 60 percent increase in permits last year, which means people are utilizing it.” 

One critical element in housing development is knowing that where you are building is a safe area. People often view their homes as a sanctuary, and safety then can be critical to attracting and retaining residents. 

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch spoke about the city’s overall safety during Thursday’s event, noting that last year the city had the lowest recorded number of shootings in its history, and that 2025 was the safest year on record for subway riders — excluding the pandemic years, when far fewer people rode the rails. 

“The people in this room decide where and how the city grows across the five boroughs,” Tisch said. “People are asking what the next chapter of this city will look like, how our business districts will grow, how our neighborhoods will thrive, and how we make sure that New York remains the most dynamic and economically vibrant city in the world. And at the center of all of those conversations is something fundamental: whether people feel safe in this city.”

Residential development wasn’t the only topic at CO’s Future of New York event. Office development was also top of mind, particularly the development of the planned supertall tower coming to Midtown Manhattan at 350 Park Avenue. The building, a joint venture between Vornado Realty Trust and Rudin, in collaboration with Ken Griffin’s Citadel — which will anchor the building — is expected to be delivered in 2032. 

Paul Darrah, chief workplace officer for Citadel, and Barry Langer, executive vice president of development and co-head of real estate at Vornado, spoke with Jonathan Mechanic, chairman of real estate at law firm Fried Frank, about the progress of the project and the importance of highly amenitized Class A office development in the post-COVID workplace. 

“Workplaces have gotten denser,” Langer said. “The ability for you as an employee to get up from your desk, go to an amenity space, go outside to a terrace, and go down to a coffee shop — it is all about how the next generation really wants to work. Having outdoor spaces that are actually usable, shielded from the wind, shielded from the sun, and proper places to put down a laptop makes them much more usable than just having a beautiful landscaping plan.”

The day wrapped with a final session addressing the economic drivers that can support greater tourism in New York City. Moderated by CO’s Gross, the panel featured Steven Fulop, former Jersey City, N.J., mayor and now president and CEO of the Partnership for New York; Thomas Grech, president and CEO of the Queens Chamber of Commerce; Slater Traaen, senior director at owner Mitsui Fudosan America; and Jessica Walker, president and CEO of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. 

The panel discussed the current state and future of tourism in New York City, highlighting the city’s desirability, while noting struggles to bring in international tourists due to economic and immigration policies like steeper tariffs and ICE raids. Still, the panel highlighted New York City’s resilience, and noted that the upcoming World Cup soccer matches happening in less than 100 days will be a boost to the city’s retail and hospitality sectors. 

“We’re anticipated to hit 66 million tourists this year,” Walker said, “which is still a little bit below where we were in 2019, before COVID, but certainly good news.” 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at [email protected].

In the wealthy enclave of Beverly Hills, excess appears to be the defining feature. From a steak dinner at Mastro’s to a full spa day at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to a special bespoke tailored suit — with trademark yellow lining — at the world-renowned House of Bijan, anything exclusive, elaborate, and in short supply can be found for a price. 

But in the rarefied world of Beverly Hills real estate, scarcity rules. Brokers try to work out new retail leases on the city’s globally recognized shopping streets years in advance, owing to the infrequent opportunities to move in. 

That’s why a series of ongoing shifts in and expansions of the city’s real estate landscape is set to radically shift the city’s profile. 

“At this moment, Beverly Hills is having a real renaissance,” said Avison Young principal and managing director Chris Bonbright.

On the site of a former shopping center on Wilshire Boulevard, the 17.5-acre, $10 billion One Beverly Hills mixed-use project — combining a five-star Aman Hotel and luxury condos, 200,000 square feet of retail gunning to become a more exclusive Rodeo Drive, and a spacious public garden and park — further expands the city’s hold on high-end retail. 

“We are transforming [Beverly Hills],” Jonathan Goldstein, CEO of co-developer Cain, told Commercial Observer in September. “In creating the public spaces, the retail center, revitalizing the classic Beverly Hilton — in the way that we’re doing — is going to reshape the center of Beverly Hills.”

This sought-after project, which started pouring the foundation in November and aims to open before the 2028 Olympics, adds premium space for new stores and dining just as existing retail destinations like Rodeo Drive commend record-setting rents, north of $1,000 a square foot, and the globe’s most luxurious brands scramble to rent, or, in increasing numbers, buy their place in this very limited retail firmament. Rents have soared 50 percent since 2019, per CBRE, with one property renting at just shy of $1,400 a square foot. 

Finally, a quirk in statewide zoning regulations may help the city add significant new housing options. Known as Builder’s Remedy, it’s a California law that states that if development-averse municipalities like Beverly Hills don’t properly plan, zone for, and entitle increased housing production to help make up the state’s yawning housing production gap, builders can get permission to erect projects that override local zoning restrictions. A number of such projects are taking shape in Beverly Hills right now, including a cluster of four towers around ​​Olympic Boulevard and South Beverly Drive.

“More than in the past, Beverly Hills is benefitting from not being in Los Angeles,” said Bonright. 

The city’s commitment to public safety and streetscape infrastructure stands in contrast to L.A., where the city has simply stopped repaving streets since last summer. More importantly for real estate, Beverly Hills doesn’t have Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax passed in 2022 that adds an additional 4 percent levy on property sales between $5.3 million and $10.6 million, and an added 5.5 percent tax on transactions for $10.6 million or more. 

“Beverly Hills spends a lot of money on the way it looks and feels, and that seems to be making a bigger difference today than it’s made in a long time,” said Bonright. “Everyone is looking to buy there.”

Buying there — specifically, the shopping meccas of Rodeo Drive, Cannon Drive and Beverly Drive — has become even more lucrative for retailers, as social media, celebrity, and soaring incomes among the upper crust have driven more attention and accumulation to those stores. A desire to make these true destination spaces has led to gardens and dining being fused with stores, such as the Gucci Osteria rooftop restaurant or Patek Philippe’s concept store with a rooftop garden. 

Commercial corridors like West Hollywood, Melrose Avenue, and Abbot Kinney may get some of the hipper, up-and-coming brands. But a spree of lease signings and transactions have shown the immense and enduring value of these Beverly Hills high streets, especially compared to a regional retail landscape — which a recent Matthews report found was suffering from poor performance, a plateauing population, and regulatory challenges.

One Rodeo, another luxury location at the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire, sold last year for $211 million. Hermes just spent $400 million on a 25,000-square-foot store at 338 North Rodeo Drive, double the size of its current Rodeo outpost. Anta, China’s answer to Nike, opened a flagship store on Rodeo in February. Louis Vuitton plans to open a 45,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed, four-story experiential flagship store on Rodeo with dedicated VIP shopping space and a venue for product launches. And luxury conglomerate LVMH plans to build a three-story Tiffany & Company flagship on a former hotel site they purchased in 2021 for $200 million.

“They only do this because they think L.A. is a very important place to be long-term,” said Newmark executive vice chairman Jay Luchs. “In this case, on Rodeo Drive, they want to always control their destiny.”

Even retail activity in nearby areas commands premiums: Ben Ashkenazy’s investment firm paid just $50 million for a two-block parcel at 9700 Wilshire Boulevard, the 184,000-square-foot Neiman Marcus building. According to JLL Managing Director Matthew Fainchtein, more than half the property on Rodeo Drive is now owned by brands instead of leased, as they see the value in owning real estate (and shutting out competitors). And owners of the remaining rental properties see the value in their holdings and will be aggressively negotiating upcoming renewals. 

While citywide, about 7.4 percent of retail space remains empty, on these key streets vacancy currently sits at functionally zero.

“Beverly Hills seems to be immune to all this sort of cyclical stuff happening in the market and in the economy,” said Fainchtein. “It’s very much in its own bubble.”

Another subset of developers, namely those that focus on multifamily and affordable projects, also have gone to great lengths to establish a foothold in the city. Beverly Hills is pretty much built out, and it can be prohibitively expensive to buy property, tear it up and build new. That is, except for Builder’s Remedy projects.

Despite the city trying to stand in their way, Bonright says they’re going to get built — hundreds of units were approved throughout 2025.

“There is always controversy around height in a mid-rise market, right?” Bonright added. 

Alan Nissel, a law professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and partner at the developer Wilshire Skyline, currently has a Builder’s Remedy project proceeding on 9229 Wilshire Boulevard, adjacent to the retail triangle bounded by Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, and Canon Drive. The 116-unit, 14-story tower is “particularly well-suited for high-density development and an opportunity to provide another architectural landmark to the city,” said Nissel. And, since it’s a commercial site, it won’t entail any residential tenant displacement.

“Developing in Beverly Hills is very difficult but there is no better place to live,” he said. “Beverly Hills is one of the few islands of safety, beauty and community left in Southern California.”

Beverly Hills is also doing better than the competing markets, as clothing brands and other major consumer-based companies are similarly paying big bucks for office buildings in the past year and a half like they’re Hermes on Rodeo Drive.

Fashion Nova’s Richard Saghian paid more than $674 a square foot to Tishman Speyer for a 175,000-square-foot Beverly Hills headquarters on North Maple Drive. Alo Yoga paid $90 million — about $1,085 per square foot — for its new Beverly Hills headquarters on Wilshire, marking one of the city’s priciest office trades of 2025. A partnership that includes Jens Grede, co-founder and CEO of Kim Kardashian’s Skims, acquired a nearly 90,000-square-foot Beverly Hills office for $61 million, a roughly 26 percent discount.

And sports gambling company FanDuel paid $71 million — or more than $1,410 per square foot — for a newly built Beverly Hills office also on Wilshire. For comparison, the office towers in Downtown L.A. are trading at around $200 to $250 a square foot since the pandemic.

Thus, Bonbright said office leasing is a niche part of the city’s real estate market.  Entertainment bigwig United Talent Agency, signed a 193,591-square-foot renewal at its namesake UTA Plaza in November. Nearby Century City, which has become a dominant West Coast office market with rents approaching double the Greater Los Angeles average, and potentially nearby Westwood, which will benefit from the soon-to-open D Line subway on Wilshire, will remain the local office draws.

But Beverly Hills maintains its role as a magnet. And while there’s little land to buy, there’s still room for the city to grow. This recent growth surge has taken place at a time when a significant portion of Beverly Hills tourist traffic from overseas hasn’t been visiting; nationally, overseas visitors dropped 6 percent year-over-year in 2025, and JLL predicts this decline in gateway markets like L.A. will hurt luxury retail.

“All this good news that’s happening locally is happening with historically low international tourism,” said Bonright. “You put that back in the mix, and then you’ve got that many more bodies on the street and dollars going into the restaurants and the stores and the hotels.”

As tens of thousands of analysts, fund managers and real estate players confabbed about the state of the market from March 9 to 13, the event was quieter than it had been in past years, according to several attendees. Many Middle Eastern representatives weren’t able to attend, held back by canceled flights stemming from the war in Iran. 

“I think there’s been a general dampening effect,” said Gunnar Branson, CEO of the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE). “You could see global investors trying to see how this turns out. It certainly felt different than it did before.”

Just weeks into the rapidly shifting Iran conflict that began Feb. 28 — one that’s evolving with every tweet, Branson said — it’s impossible to gather detailed data on the impact of hostilities around the Strait of Hormuz, the all-important oil shipping channel. But there’s plenty of speculation around the inflationary impacts of a prolonged spike in energy prices and open-ended fighting. 

Investors and analysts broadly share a consensus that this will be a short conflict, causing a tapping of the brakes for deal-makers rather than an abrupt stop. This war won’t broadly shift the existing trends in foreign investment flows into U.S. property, and may prove to be a speed bump for the real estate recovery that has shaped up in recent months. Despite the feared outbreak of significant hostilities in the Persian Gulf, in real estate, pragmatism and positive momentum appear to be winning out. 

“These events are obviously playing on investors’ psyches, but, when it comes back to actual fundamentals in global real estate markets, there are still positive signs,” said Simon Chinn, vice president of research and advisory services for the Urban Land Institute. “Despite this volatility, many in the industry recognize you can’t just sit on the sidelines. Unpredictability has become the only constant now.” 

In recent months, there has been a noticeable uptick in transaction volume and overall improved sentiment in commercial real estate, buoyed by a firming up of prices. Falling interest rates, falling hedging costs and a declining dollar had created a strong backdrop for international investment in the U.S., said Alex Foshay, Newmark executive vice chairman and the head of its international capital markets group.

While total direct foreign investment in U.S. commercial real estate was $26 billion last year, a drop from $29.7 billion in 2024 and far from recent peaks (like the $95 billion invested in 2018), circumstances had teed up a return to more aggressive deal-making. The fourth quarter of 2025 saw $10 billion in such investment alone, per Newmark. Whether you’re an Australian superannuation pool, a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund or a German pension system, you “want to buy into the story” the U.S. is selling, Foshay said.  

“From a geopolitical standpoint, show me a country that feels safer right now,” said Branson. “We’re sort of the tallest short person in the room. And 50 percent of the institutional-quality commercial real estate is here.”

So far, many of the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds have been publicly silent, making few if any statements about the war and its repercussions on investment strategy, especially regarding where their capital flows. 

Foshay, who works with major Middle Eastern funds, said that in recent discussions leaders have said they’re “steadfast in their positions” and continue to pursue their 2026 investment requirements. Gulf investors have deployed over $10 billion into New York City real estate since 2020, according to Newmark data, and made additional investment in U.S. skyscrapers, student housing and offices. 

As long as the conflict is brief, the impact on capital flows — and the view of the U.S. as the best place for long-term investment — should remain largely unchanged, said Sam Chandan, founding director and professor at New York University’s Chao-Hon Chen Institute for Global Real Estate Finance. 

Chandan has one qualifier: Investors from the United States who may have been evaluating opportunities to deploy capital in the Persian Gulf region will place more emphasis in their calculus on the potential for geopolitical instability in the area. The long-sought image of places like Dubai as an international haven for capital and financial firms is a critical focus for Middle Eastern leaders, and a reputation they hope doesn’t take a hit.

For the first two months of the year, the mood within commercial real estate was decidedly upbeat. An Urban Land Institute global survey published in December picked up on improving optimism around investment opportunities in 2026, and an AFIRE survey posted in February found cross-border investors were not only excited to increase their investment in the U.S. this year, but also ranked the country as the safest business environment, despite growing skepticism. Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they didn’t foresee a wave of divestment from the U.S. anytime soon.

Data from MSCI found a 12 percent year-over-year increase in global real estate deal value in 2025, and the U.S. real estate market has “level set” in recent months, according to Jim Costello, executive director at investment adviser MSCI, finally adjusting to the post-COVID landscape and moving forward. The LightBox CRE Activity Index — which aggregates commercial listings, appraisals and other U.S. transaction data — hit 118.2 in February before the outbreak of hostilities, the highest level in the last four years. 

“We’re seeing an uptick in transactions, a deeper, more diverse buying pool, and people putting money to work deploying capital,” said Manus Clancy, head of data strategy at LightBox. “It wasn’t just opportunistic buyers. Everybody was dipping their toes in.”

However, a conflict that escalates — either becoming more intense amid existing players, or begging to entrap more countries in the region, or more seriously damaging oil infrastructure — may lead to an inflationary spiral in the U.S. that eventually causes a rise in interest rates and a reassessment in values. Newmark’s Foshay believes any conflict that runs past eight weeks will begin to raise investor concerns. And stopping that spiral may prove much more difficult. 

“Compared to U.S. tariff disputes and Liberation Day last April, what is happening at the moment is much harder to switch off,” said ULI’s Chinn.

The conflict’s impact on U.S. real estate activity can be divided into two buckets, said MSCI’s Costello: the real economy, which takes much longer to show an impact, and the financial economy. 

The latter has already seen some war-related activity in recent weeks. Both the 10-Year Treasury Index and Moody’s BAA Corporate Bond Index have increased. The former, a benchmark off which many loans are priced, went from 3.97 to nearly 4.2 percent between late February and March 11, and the latter is moving faster and widening the spread. Costello sees that widening spread as a leading indicator of risk aversion, and eventually an increase in cap rates. 

The impact on the real economy — higher energy rates, rising inflation, increased costs, an economic slowdown and corporate tenants leasing less space — will take much longer to percolate. Costello recommends keeping an eye on second-quarter brokerage reports to gauge where the real estate market is going. 

But, if and when that impact is felt — if a barrel of oil costs $125 for half a year or longer because of persistent supply problems — that begins to cycle through the economy and real estate market. Inflationary pressure hits buying power, hurting retail and hotels, while rising energy costs spike utility bills for apartments in particular, hammering net operating income and squashing the seeds of multifamily recovery. It “slams the brakes on the U.S. economy,” said LightBox’s Clancy.

There’s real risk to a prolonged conflict. Chinn also sees the conflict, regardless of its next stages, reinforcing many emerging themes in real estate investment and operations during this period of increasing instability. That includes reassuring the resiliency, as well as the cyber and physical security, of key assets. (Attacks on Amazon data centers in the Gulf have raised the specter of these assets becoming new wartime targets.)

But there’s also a sense that a repeated cycle of crises — COVID in 2020 and 2021, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the inflation spike that same year, the 2023 regional banking breakdown — have created a numbness to crisis. 

“The fact that none of this has turned into the sky really is falling,” Clancy said, “has made people a bit comfortable.”

Developers Cammeby’s International Group and Rybak Development submitted a rezoning application with the New York City Department of City Planning on Tuesday to build two 22-story buildings with a total of 703 units at 3030 Ocean Parkway and 400 Neptune Avenue, the filing shows.

The project, if approved, would go up on the same block as a pair of existing 23-story apartment buildings known as Shorecrest Towers, which are at 2940 and 3000 Ocean Parkway. The two buildings were part of the original Trump Village that was built in the 1960s, according to Crain’s New York Business, which first reported news of the plans.

One of the proposed new buildings at 3030 Ocean Parkway would include 345 apartments — 69 of which would be affordable — and approximately 10,695 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, as well as 5,075 square feet for a community facility on the building’s sixth floor and a 386-space parking garage on the first through fifth floors, according to the application.

The other proposed building at 400 Neptune Avenue would include 358 apartments — 72 to 107 of which would be affordable — and a 298-space parking garage on the first through fifth floors. The two new buildings would replace a parking lot for Shorecrest Towers residents.

If approved, the project in full would include four buildings and cover a total of 1,148 residential units and 2 million square feet upon completion, which is set for 2034, the filing shows.

Spokespeople for Cammeby’s and Rybak did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This wouldn’t be Cammeby’s and Rybak’s first housing project together in Coney Island. In 2021, the two developers worked on a three-tower residential megaproject at 532 Neptune Avenue, which has 499 apartments.

But Rybak is also moving forward by itself on another development in the neighborhood. In October, the New York City Economic Development Corporation selected Rybak to build more than 500 units of mixed-income housing on Surf Avenue between West 21st and West 22nd streets for a project called Coney Island West, as Commercial Observer previously reported.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at [email protected].

BMO, one of Canada’s largest banks, plans to open more than 130 locations in California and roughly 15 locations in Arizona over the next five years. With more than 220 existing locations in the Golden State, BMO’s expansion plans would increase its footprint by nearly 60 percent in California alone. Reuters first reported the news. 

The bank is expecting to open seven new storefronts in California in 2026: three in Greater Los Angeles, two in San Diego and another two in the San Francisco Bay Area. The exact addresses and sizes of these spaces were not immediately available. 

BMO’s expansion plans are the next iteration for a company that has grown massively over the past few years. The bank in 2023 acquired BNP Paribas‘ U.S. division for $16.3 billion — its biggest acquisition ever — automatically making it a top 10 U.S. bank. That acquisition grew BMO’s U.S. assets by some 50 percent, adding approximately 500 retail stores to its repertoire. 

Yet BMO isn’t just expanding across the board. The bank announced in October that it would sell 138 locations to First Citizens Bank & Trust Company to reinvest in higher-growth states such as California. Under the deal, which is expected to close later this year, First Citizens will assume approximately $5.7 billion in deposits and buy about $1.1 billion in debt from BMO in exchange for the properties. 

Despite California’s high cost of doing business, and the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, BMO isn’t the only financial institution expanding its presence on the West Coast lately. Customers Bank recently opened five new locations in Southern California, Sacramento, Las Vegas and in Reno, Nev., Commercial Observer reported in November, in order to fill the gap created by closures and bank mergers. 

Nick Trombola can be reached at [email protected].

San Francisco-based Prologis and Singapore’s GIC have formed a $1.6 billion joint venture targeting build-to-suit logistics developments across the U.S. The JV includes an existing portfolio of 4 million square feet, with undefined “additional capacity” available for future expansion, according to the firms. 

“With strong e-commerce growth, the re-shoring of supply chains and resilient consumer spending, industrial remains a strong long-term investment theme in North America,” Goh Chin Kiong, GIC’s chief investment officer of real estate, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Prologis, a best-in-class operator, reflects our shared conviction in the sector and like-minded approach to deploying capital with discipline across cycles.”

Build-to-suit is among the strongest industrial subclasses due to increasingly crucial tenant priorities regarding location and capability, particularly among high-tech industries such as e-commerce, data centers and aerospace. The subclass has become an increasingly larger part of Prologis’ $230 billion platform as a result. The firm started $3.1 billion in industrial projects last year, and more than 60 percent of them are build-to-suit, per Prologis. 

“Build-to-suit activity continues to be one of the clearest signals of customer conviction across our business,” Daniel Letter, Prologis’ CEO, said in a statement. “This joint venture with GIC builds on that momentum by pairing our platform and development expertise with a partner that shares our long-term perspective.”

More than 354 million square feet of industrial space was under construction in the U.S. at the start of this year, representing nearly 2 percent of the nation’s entire existing stock, according to a recent report by CommercialSearch. Much of that activity is driven by data center development, particularly in Texas and in Greater Washington, D.C. Indeed, the latter’s industrial development pipeline has more than doubled within the past year alone, to some 13.2 million square feet, and the D.C. region’s projected inventory expansion is tied with Austin, Texas, for largest in the country. 

Prologis is, naturally, no stranger to the data center world. The firm inked 228 million square feet of new lease deals last year — its highest volume ever — and grew its data center capacity to 5.7 gigawatts, with another 14,000 acres of land banked for data center-related development, according to its latest earnings report. 

Commercial Observer recently sat down with Damon Austin, Prologis’ newly minted chief development officer, to discuss the firm’s data center ecosystem and its challenges as AI advances explode across the globe. 

Nick Trombola can be reached at [email protected]. 

Entrepreneur Griffin Taylor’s latest Brooklyn project is a slam dunk for the next generation of basketball greats coming out of New York City. 

In September, Griffin and business partner Jared Effron opened training facility the Program at 255 Java Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The 12,500-square-foot converted warehouse is about a 10-minute walk from the G train, and has been backed by some of basketball’s biggest names, including Carmelo Anthony, Sue Bird, Miles McBride and 1992 Olympic “Dream Team” member Chris Mullin — whose son Chris Mullin Jr. is the head of memberships at the Program. 

“I’ve been a basketball junkie for as long as I can remember, and I realized that if it was going to be a part of my career, it was going to have to be an impact I made off the court,” Taylor said. “I’d been working in grassroots in my 20s. I noticed two things. One, there’s  a narrative that in New York City we just weren’t producing as many high-level basketball players as we used to and, two, that in New York, consumer-facing, accessible, state-of-the-art basketball facilities, especially for youth, really didn’t exist.” 

So Taylor and his co-founder decided to fill that void and provide a place where kids between the ages of 6 and 17 could come and get the extra training and coaching needed to hone their skills and earn those high school championships or collegiate scholarships, and maybe even pursue pro careers. (There are also programs at the Program for adults. The organic breakdown among the kids has turned out to be 65 percent boys and 35 percent girls.) 

The founders connected with Spectorgroup, a New York-based architecture firm that helped the Program find the right space and convert it into a professional-grade basketball training facility. 

“I’m friends with Jared Effron, so that’s what brought us all together,” said Scott Spector, principal of Spectorgroup. “This facility was probably one of five different sites we studied together. We did a lot of due diligence on a lot of different spaces. One space didn’t work because it was too small, and another was too big. One we would have had to knock down, and that was just not going to work for us.”

Eventually they chose the space at 255 Java Street, and together built a facility with a full court plus a half-court training space (so group and private sessions can take place simultaneously), a weight room for extra workouts, conference and office space for the staff, and a recovery room that will soon feature a cold plunge. There is a small retail area as well. 

Surrounding the enormous basketball court — which was made to NBA and NCAA standards — is a wall of jerseys highlighting some of the sport’s most celebrated and influential players. 

“The jersey wall is really unique in that it’s sort of a historical library of all the players, or mostly all the players, that made contributions to New York City basketball,” Taylor said. 

The outside of the once-unassuming storage space is now adorned with a bright, colorful and energetic mural designed by local street artist Sandro “Sen2” Figueroa. 

“This space is such an amazing example of adaptive reuse,” Spector said. “It’s just one of those perfect fits for a space. … They invested proper dollars for this to be what it is supposed to be.”

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at [email protected].

For more than 40 years, Milrose Consultants has supported owners, developers, architects, and engineers in navigating this complexity across the full building life cycle. As the nation’s leading permitting, code consulting, and municipal compliance firms, Milrose helps project teams anticipate regulatory requirements, coordinate approvals, and keep development timelines moving forward.

From early planning and design through construction and ongoing operations, this life cycle approach helps teams manage regulatory risk across jurisdictions. One area where this expertise has become especially critical is permitting.

Why permitting complexity has increased nationwide

Over the past decade, regulatory frameworks across major cities have evolved to address sustainability mandates, accessibility requirements, environmental compliance, and building safety standards.

While these regulations serve important public objectives, they also introduce new layers of review and documentation that must be carefully coordinated.

Projects in markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami often require coordination across multiple agencies including building departments, zoning authorities, planning boards, and special inspection programs.

Without a clear permitting strategy, these overlapping approvals can create unpredictable review cycles and schedule delays.

Where projects lose time

Permitting delays rarely occur because of poor design. More often, they happen because regulatory requirements were not fully anticipated before submissions are made.

Common permitting challenges include:

• Conflicting agency requirements.
• Jurisdiction-specific documentation standards.
• Environmental or zoning triggers identified late in the process.
• Special inspection coordination during construction.
• Lack of alignment between permitting timelines and construction schedules.

Addressing these risks early can dramatically improve project timeline predictability.

Case study: Coordinating permitting for national retail expansion

A national retail brand undertaking a multi-market expansion program required approvals across more than 20 jurisdictions.

Each market presented unique regulatory frameworks, permitting processes, and agency expectations.

By implementing centralized permit tracking, early agency coordination, and jurisdiction-specific submission planning, the project team was able to anticipate regulatory hurdles before filings were made.

Outcome:
Permits were secured across multiple markets while maintaining aggressive store opening schedules.Case study: High-volume permitting in regulated environments

A major financial institution required permitting coordination across multiple projects within highly regulated operational environments.

The work involved numerous permit applications, agency reviews, and compliance approvals tied to strict operational deadlines.

Through structured permit management and proactive agency communication, the project team streamlined approvals while maintaining visibility across all jurisdictions.

Outcome:
Projects progressed on schedule with consistent approvals and minimal administrative delays.

Permitting strategy is becoming a competitive advantage

As regulatory environments grow more complex, permitting strategy is increasingly becoming a differentiator for successful development teams.

Developers who integrate regulatory planning into early project phases are better positioned to anticipate jurisdictional requirements, coordinate approvals across agencies, and maintain schedule predictability.

This shift toward proactive permitting management is helping teams reduce delays, manage risk, and deliver projects with greater certainty.

For project teams navigating multiple jurisdictions, understanding permitting requirements before submissions are made can significantly improve schedule outcomes.

To help development teams better navigate these challenges, Milrose Consultants recently published a national guide outlining strategies for managing permitting complexity across multiple jurisdictions.

The National Permitting Playbook covers:

• Key permitting challenges across major jurisdictions.
• Strategies for coordinating with Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs).
• Common approval bottlenecks that delay projects.
• Practical ways to streamline permitting and maintain timelines.

Download the National Permitting Playbook:

A partnership between the Walter J. Company and Metro won approvals earlier this month for Centro Westlake, massive development planned for a roughly 150,000-square-foot parcel between Wilshire Boulevard, Alvarado Street, Westlake Avenue, and Seventh Street in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood, according to Urbanize, which first reported the news.

The JV’s plans call for a two-tower complex, rising 55 stories and 39 stories, which would include 668 residential units, including 234 affordable units; a 300-key hotel; 105,000 square feet of office space; 10,000 square feet of medical office space; and about 56,700 square feet of retail space. 

Twenty percent of the retail space would also be reserved for local Westlake businesses, according to a previous announcement by Walter J. Company. The development firm is the brainchild of Dr. Walter Jayasinghe, a local physician who has owned and operated the nearby Wilshire Medical Building since 1992. 

Jayasinghe’s firm entered into an exclusive negotiating agreement with Metro in 2020, as the project site is above the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station, about two miles west of Downtown L.A. The project is in line with Gov. Newsom’s and State Sen. Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 79, also known as the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. The law essentially forces cities across the state to allow high-density housing projects near major transit hubs in order to address the state’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. It was not immediately clear if Centro Westlake was approved directly because of the law. 

Representatives for Walter J. Company and Metro did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The project’s development timeline was also not immediately clear.

Nick Trombola can be reached at [email protected].

Rodney Sani, using the limited liability company Oxford Assets, submitted plans to convert the former Bungalow 8 nightclub in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood into a 16-story mixed-use building with 62 luxury apartments, according to an application filed last week with the New York City Department of Buildings.

The proposed building at 515 West 27th Street would include 17,564 square feet of residential space and 240 square feet of commercial space, as well as bicycle parking and roof terraces, the filing shows.

As part of the project, the existing vacant one-story building between 10th and 11th avenues that housed Bungalow 8 would be demolished, Crain’s New York Business reported.

Sani, whose involvement in the project is unclear, could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for Hertz Engineering — the engineer listed on the project — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A new buyer is also set to take over the Chelsea property. An undisclosed party is currently in a “hard non-refundable contract” to purchase the building, which has an asking price of $5.9 million, according to Meridian Capital’s David Schechtman, who is marketing the property.

The deal is expected to close in early April, Crain’s reported.

Club owner and socialite Amy Sacco opened the Bungalow 8 nightclub in 2001, and it quickly became an A-list celebrity hot spot in the early 2000s. Stars such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and George Clooney often frequented the spot.

Bungalow 8 eventually closed in 2009 following a decline in popularity and a failed comeback. The property was most recently occupied by fine art gallery Ross + Kramer Gallery.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at [email protected].

But, while the sale surpassed a milestone that had stood for seven years, Zaitzeff’s mark was eclipsed by year’s end, with an $87.5 million sale at 140 Jane Street in August. (A $129 million sale at the condo building at 80 Clarkson Street followed in December, but that was for multiple units.)

“It speaks to the amount of confidence buyers have, especially after my sale,” said Zaitzeff. “People are like, ‘You know what? $10,000 a square foot is not crazy.’ It gave people [permission], like, ‘I can spend $10,000 a foot because somebody else did.’ Once you break those records, it gives greater confidence to people who can afford that number.”

If you’re wondering about the current strength of Manhattan condo sales toward the top of the market, rest assured that it’s going gangbusters.

“I don’t think we’ve seen a stronger eight, 10, 12 months previously. I started in the business around 2011, and I haven’t seen a stronger, more healthy market. We’re seeing 25, 30, 35 contracts above $4 million per week for the last six months,” said Zaitzeff, referring to figures from the Olshan Luxury Market Report, which tracks residential sales in Manhattan over $4 million.

By most accounts, 2025 was a strong year for condo sales in Manhattan overall, assisted toward the end by the Federal Reserve’s three interest rate cuts. 

A Brown Harris Stevens report said that in 2025, “sales climbed to their highest level since 2022” in Manhattan’s residential real estate market overall, in part due to New York City’s economy “outperforming the nation over the past two years — and expected to do so again in 2026.”

The company noted that the median sales price for condominiums in the borough — reflecting prices in the middle of the data set — rose from $1.65 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 to $1.69 million a year later. Average condo prices — calculated to include the extreme highs and lows — rose accordingly, from $2,994,708 to $3,046,461.

Wei Min Tan, associate real estate broker at R New York, noted that the three interest rate cuts in 2025 gave a boost to the lower end of the market by helping reduce mortgage costs.

“Rates going down was going to help the more entry-level buyers and those at lower price points — let’s say $3 million and below,” said Tan.

To that end, Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of appraiser Miller Samuel, noted that while there was growth in Manhattan condo sales in 2025, co-op sales, at considerably lower average and median price ranges, jumped by twice as much.

“Condo sales rose year-over-year 3.4 percent, and co-ops rose 7 percent,” said Miller. “The reason for the difference is that the median price of co-ops is $825,000, and the median price of condos in Manhattan is $1,661,000, so they’re effectively double.”

Miller said, then, that the decline in interest rates by year’s end gave co-op buyers a boost.

“Because of their lower price point, co-ops tend to reflect a buyer pool that is more reliant on mortgage rates,” said Miller. “Whereas condo buyers tend to have a higher share of cash buyers.”

Reflecting the differential, cash buyers represented 57 percent of the co-op market, but 74.4 percent of the condo market, Miller said. 

On the condo side, those cash buyers were spending an awful lot of it. As much as lower rates assisted buyers on the lower end, the higher end has seen far more frantic activity. 

“Some of the downward movement in mortgage rates is definitely getting people who had been playing a wait-and-see game to come back into the market,” said Ryan Schleis, senior vice president of research and analytics for the Corcoran Group and Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. “We’re really seeing a lot of strength at the high end. Deals over $5 million have been super strong, and tight supply is influencing the market a lot. When something new comes to market that people are excited about, a great product that’s priced well, they’re selling really fast.”

By way of example, Schleis mentioned 1122 Madison Avenue, a condominium building still under construction where the duplex penthouse — with 9,350 square feet of indoor space and 1,982 square feet of outdoor space, including a rooftop terrace with Central Park views — sold in late February 2026 for $89.5 million, the highest overall price and price per square foot ever for a condominium in the Upper East Side, according to developers Legion Investment Group and Nahla Capital. 

The Wall Street Journal, which also cited 1122 Madison as the highest residential price achieved so far in 2026, noted in late February that “since sales launched in January, 18 of the building’s 26 units have gone into contract,” and that the developers had raised prices four times.

Corcoran Sunshine has the exclusive listing on the building.

“We just put a few more apartments in contract there, and I think we’re down to just two left,” Schleis said of the building, which isn’t expected to be completed and occupied until fall 2027. “It’s really tapped into this trend of very tight supply at some of the most prime, in-demand locations. When you finally get new product, people are really coming out of the woodwork.”

Zaitzeff noted that 1122 Madison Avenue — which the developers have said sold for an average of more than $5,400 per square foot for the first 18 units —  is not the only exciting new development property to attract never-before-seen prices.

“When A-plus inventory is on the market, those things sell quite quickly,” said Zaitzeff. “Look at 80 Clarkson, the newest building downtown. They just reported that they’ve hit $1 billion in sales. They still have more to do, because the total sellout is $3 billion. But they’re achieving between $7,000 and $10,000 per square foot. These are numbers we never saw before below 34th Street.” 

But if the high end of the new development condo market is brimming with good news several months into 2026, a broader consideration of condo sales performance over the past several months shows a different, more complex and potentially depressing picture due to several external factors, including one that could carry over throughout the year and maybe beyond. 

Gregory Heym, executive vice president and chief economist at Brown Harris Stevens Residential Sales, said he believes the brutally cold New York City winter has dampened the market over the past few months.

“Contracts have been a little depressed, and I think the weather’s had a lot to do with that, as it has with so many other parts of the economy,” said Heym.

But, if the weather has been a minor obstacle for condo sales, the market faces more extreme potential threats due to the war in Iran.

While it’s impossible to know how long the war will last — and therefore how badly it could affect various aspects of the economy, especially energy costs — Miller said he believes the war is already depressing buying activity, and could have more dire effects down the road if the conflict continues for a significant length of time.

“There has been a pause, or a pullback, in contract activity because of the Iran war in the neighborhood of what appears to be about 5 to 7 percent,” said Miller. “This is distorting our understanding of what 2026 is going to look like compared to the same period last year.”

Part of this, said Miller, is that the sudden instability of oil prices leaves the 30-year mortgage rate “sort of stuck” above 6 percent. This is a problem not only on the sales front, but for inventory as well.

“I think higher interest rates are going to continue to reduce the inflow of new development into the housing market,” said Miller. “And I think what we may see when the dust settles on 2026 is more price growth in new development than resales.”

Schleis said Corcoran Sunshine has been seeing “very solid, average levels of activity week in and week out.” But he also said the firm has been seeing a decrease in international buyers in New York City for around six months, one that is not being helped by the recent military conflict.

“In general, it’s due to global events and general immigration policy in the U.S. — people being a bit more concerned about the ease of their travel back and forth between here and wherever they’re from,” said Schleis. “Historically, this number varies depending on what’s for sale and what is happening in the world, but we might see 20 to 30 percent of new development buyers being international. As of late, that number’s been under 10 percent.”

On the other side of the buying equation, any temporary reduction in the size of the buyer pool won’t be nearly enough to mitigate the coming supply shortage when it comes to New York City condos, as inventory is projected to shrink rapidly.    

Zaitzeff said he believes this partly explains the strong recent sales at the upper end of the market, as people seek to buy while there is still enough inventory to give them a variety of options.

“We’ve seen a lot of the smarter money buy right now because they know that in a year or two we’re going to have virtually no inventory,” said Zaitzeff.

The problem has been masked, said Schleis, by the fact that certain desirable new development buildings still have a number of unsold units. This is misleading, he said.

“A huge proportion of what is unsold in new development is contained in just a handful of buildings,” said Schleis. “The last time we ran these numbers, around a third of the unsold new development in Manhattan was in only six buildings, out of the 100 new development buildings that have some unsold inventory in the entire borough. So a lot of the inventory is concentrated. If you take that out, we’re already in an extremely tight inventory condition, and that’s why some of these new buildings are selling really, really quickly.”

Corcoran Sunshine believes that the supply versus demand imbalance will soon be impossible to ignore.

“We’re predicting that there are about 500 fewer units projected to enter the market than what we typically sell,” said Schleis. “So every year, over the next few years, you’re likely to see the new development inventory — which stands at about 3,000 unsold apartments, roughly speaking, in Manhattan — decline by 500 units. That’s going to get really tight, and we’re going to quickly be back to the ultra-low inventory we last had around 2013.”

Zaitzeff said he believes the government needs to take supportive action to get developers building again. That includes New York State lawmakers resurrecting something akin to the 421a development tax incentive that expired in 2022.

“You’ve got to have some tax incentives and deregulation for developers to build again,” said Zaitzeff. “All the construction lending dried up after COVID and the 421a tax abatements went out, so developers are not incentivized to build anymore. By the end of 2027 there’s going to be nothing available in new development inventory. Resale prices will go through the roof.”

And, given the uncertainty surrounding the war, Miller foresees a near future in which the collapse in supply creates “a shock to the condo development market, where pricing is going to be much higher.”

“I remember talking to a top-level executive at a national lender,” said Miller. “I asked, ‘How do you think about inflation and mortgage rates — how do you anticipate?’ And the answer was, ‘It’s all about energy prices.’ What’s going on in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Middle East is the specter overlying the potential for new development volume to increase over the next couple of years. And the coming downturn over the next two years is going to create a price premium that’s going to become distorted because of the spike in interest rates.”

Asked how high he believes prices can go, Miller notes that the median price for new development condos is currently around $2.5 million, and said he wouldn’t be surprised if “in a year it could exceed the $3 million threshold and beyond.”

For now, though, brokerages are working hard to sell the inventory that is there, and brokers see rich potential for high-priced sales in the immediate future before having to worry about the supply shortage to come.

“We’re entering into our peak selling season of March, April and May, and we’re getting great traffic on our sites,” said Schleis. “Brokers I talk to are feeling very positive. They’ve got buyers. So I think it’s going to be a strong spring.”

Larry Getlen can be reached at [email protected].

Building something that will be spoken about for decades, in a city where it isn’t easy to impress people, is what drives Victor Sigoura, founder and CEO of Legion Investment Group, a development and investment firm that focuses on luxury residential buildings in Manhattan. 

Sigoura, a 49-year-old married father of four and a 2001 graduate of the Cardozo School of Law — his first day at law firm Greenberg Traurig was on Sept. 10 of that year — had planned to start his career in the real estate department. He would instead first spend about two years in Greenberg Traurig’s litigation practice. It was not an area he wanted to focus his career on, as he’d always had a passion and an interest in real estate. 

Eventually, Sigoura would go on to establish a career in real estate that would be defined by impressive deals, legendary mentors and iconic buildings.

Commercial Observer recently caught up with Sigoura to discuss his career beginnings, the founding of Legion, the projects his firm is involved in, and his thoughts on the Manhattan luxury condominium market in general. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: How did you go from litigation law to real estate?

Victor Sigoura: I started as a first-year associate at Greenberg Traurig and, prior to officially starting, I was slated to work in the firm’s real estate department. But, at that time, real estate was pretty slow, and they needed people in the litigation department. I think that everything happens in life for a good reason. So I said, “You know what? I’ll go into the litigation department to start.” 

I ended up getting close with a securities litigation partner, and I didn’t like the concept of litigation that goes on for 10, 12, 15 years sometimes, and so I gravitated to this securities litigation partner, and he and I ended up working closely together for about two years. The good part of that was that it was a lot of mediations and arbitrations. So it was more about resolving lawsuits. 

I had a really great experience there, but I had always wanted to be in real estate and thought I could use the law as a springboard to that. While I was in the litigation department, I stayed in touch with people I had known in real estate circles. And I ended up bringing some business to the firm, which for a first- or second-year associate is not that common, and I stayed in touch with the real estate people.

So, finally, after about two years, I went to the real estate partner at the time, and I said, “I brought in some business. And frankly, I don’t know much about real estate, but, if I knew more, maybe I could bring in more business.” Sure enough, I moved into the real estate department. One of my first deals that I worked on as an associate was actually the acquisition of the Plaza Hotel by Miki Naftali’s El Ad Group.

What did working on the $675 million sale of the Plaza Hotel in 2004 teach you?

The Plaza deal was great in terms of getting that full exposure to a lot of different parts of development. Obviously, we were renovating the entire building, but it contained a whole bunch of different components.

We had residential condos, we had retail, and we had a hotel. I was working on all parts of it,  and so I got great exposure to all those different parts of real estate. The most challenging part of that was trying to figure out the retail component because the retail — and what today is a food hall — was all below grade. And we had this challenge with all of this retail space. That was because we took a very large hotel and we lessened the amount of rooms, and increased the residential side. And so we had a challenge of figuring out how the retail could work. 

So there were some starts and stops with that. It wasn’t successful right off the bat, but, when we decided to go to a food hall concept, it was really successful.

I spent a lot of time going through the landmarks process. I spent a lot of time working with the unions on the hotel side. I spent a lot of time working with Fairmont, who was the management company of the Plaza Hotel. And, again, a lot of time on retail and food and beverage. So I really got a very broad view of real estate development. 

What was the inspiration for you to found Legion Investment Group?

In mid-2014 and early 2015 there was a lull in the market, and, after a while, I started to think maybe it was time to give this a shot on my own. I had previously gone through the process of founding something when I started with Naftali Group, and seeing those growing pains. 

So I was aware of a lot of the things that I needed to do and be prepared for. And I thought that would be a great challenge.

Where did the name come from?

I was reading a book about leadership and I cannot remember the name, but it was around the time I was starting the company. I remember that in a particular part of the book the author was discussing how he’d gone to visit Ralph Lauren [the firm]. He was describing the visit and how successful Ralph Lauren was, and, as he was describing it, he said it seemed like “a legion of people working together towards a common goal.” And I said, “Oh, well, that could be a good name for a company.”

What was Legion’s first project?

Just a little while after we started the company, we put together an assemblage at 109 East 79th Street, and as Legion, that was our first large condo development. We started it pre-COVID-19 and finished post-COVID. It was 145,000 square feet with 100 feet of frontage on 79th Street. We put together what was essentially five townhouses — well, four townhouses, plus one multifamily building with rent-stabilization — so it took us some time to put together. 

But, once we did, we built 32 units and we were pretty much sold out prior to our first temporary certificate of occupancy. We sold its units for a little bit over $4,000 a foot, and for a mid-block building that was unique. Today we’ve turned over the building to the condo board, and everything seems to be going well. After that, we acquired some other properties at other locations. Several of them were assemblages, like 1122 Madison Avenue. 

What was the assemblage process like for 1122 Madison Avenue, and what’s the status of the project today?

It was a five-parcel assemblage, plus air rights, plus dealing with a multifamily building with a rent-stabilized tenant. And, actually, that is a very nice story. There was a tenant, she was a 92-year-old woman, and she was living in that walkup building on either the third or fourth floor, and the steps were so steep. I mean, I walked up them and I was tired. So we worked with her nephew to move her into another, more accessible building, and her nephew sent us a very nice email thanking us for treating her so well.

But there was a lot to do to get us to the finish line. We bought air rights from a co-op adjacent to us. We bought a light and air easement from them. We bought air rights from another townhouse on 83rd Street. So it took us a while to assemble the property, but, thankfully, we did it. 

As of now, we’ve completed the superstructure and we’re enclosing the building, so the windows are almost entirely up right now. We hope to start delivering in the fall of next year. We opened up our sales office on Jan. 15 and we’re selling very well. We have four units left to sell out of 26. After putting this together since 2018, it’s really gratifying to see people reacting to the building this way. 

And one of the penthouses at 1122 Madison was sold for a record $89.5 million, correct?

Yes, that was very exciting for us! It is the highest-priced condo sale ever on the Upper East Side. However, there have been one or two co-ops that were priced higher. The buyer is a local New York buyer, and the unit itself has some very interesting features. It’s about 9,300 square feet and has about 2,000 square feet of outdoor rooftop space. It has beautiful views of Central Park, and the living room has a 20-foot ceiling.

What’s the story at 38 Gramercy Park East?

That was a very interesting assemblage. We bought six parcels. First, we bought four that were basically on 21st Street and Third Avenue, and then went half the block toward Gramercy Park, and we bought two parcels. One was a co-op of 34 different shareholders, and one was a multifamily building with two rent-stabilized tenants. 

And we ultimately put that together in such a way where we were able to close essentially on almost everything simultaneously. We assembled the six parcels and we’ve now demoed those, and we’re doing excavation and foundation work.

It’s going to be the first ground-up development on Gramercy Park in over 100 years. Gramercy Park is a historic district, so our property actually is right on the border of the Gramercy Park Historic District. So we’re able to build ground-up. It’s a very exciting addition, I think, not only to Gramercy Park, but for Manhattan as a whole.

And you get to be part of New York City’s history.

Yes! That’s a big part of the development side of things.  Once you develop something, you’re really making a mark on the city, that — God willing — will be there forever. That’s a really important feature and a reason why I love to do this. 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at [email protected].

But the firm is leveling up again: With 2 million square feet of residential and mixed-use projects across New York City under its belt and an additional 1 million square feet currently in the pipeline, Avdoo is charging headfirst into the Manhattan market with high-profile, neighborhood-defining condominium developments. 

Take its Upper East Side project slated for East 71st Street and Second Avenue, a Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA)-designed 22-story tower with interiors by AD100 designer Alyssa Kapito poised for delivery in 2028. Or its 400-foot tower planned for King and Varick streets in the emerging and largely low-slung neighborhood of Hudson Square, or a forthcoming project in Chelsea, both of which do not yet have an architect and interior designer attached to them publicly. 

To accommodate this growth, the vertically integrated company plans to almost double its design development side from about 30 people to up to 50 in 2026 and move into a new, larger office. At the helm of this flurry of activity sits Avdoo, the man — a self-described workaholic who wants to deliver buildings as beautiful and unique as they are impactful to their neighborhoods.

“We don’t see ourselves as just a developer, but we see ourselves as a curator, as a storyteller. Every project is a unique story,” the 51-year-old Avdoo said, speaking from his firm’s current Manhattan office on West 37th Street. “It’s almost like every project is a book that’s part of a larger series. And what we’ve learned in the business, and what the business has taught us, is that if you write a great story and they love the book, people are going to want to read the next one.”

Leaps of faith

Shlomi Avdoo is an immigrant New York success story. He and his family moved from Bat Yam, a sea town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel, to Forest Hills, Queens, when Avdoo was 10 years old.

He landed at Queens College where he could be close to his parents, a locksmith and a stay-at-home mom, and still help them with everything they needed, he said. He graduated with an economics degree in 1997 and followed it up with a law degree in 2000 from Touro College. He decided to enroll in law school at the behest of the woman who would later become his sister-in-law, and who had submitted his law school application unbeknownst to him. 

From his late teens to late 20s, Avdoo worked the Manhattan circuit as an event producer. It taught him that leveling up in your career is often staked on who you know and work with. 

Through guys in finance he met while producing events, he got a job as a stockbroker for Wall Street firm GlobeShare, a subsidiary of Laidlaw Global Securities. But it wasn’t for him. He decided to put his law degree to use and opened a practice, Turner & Avdoo Spiegelman & Associates, with his brother-in-law in 2001. The firm focused on real estate transaction law. 

Even still, Avdoo’s heart wasn’t in it. 

“My passion was never in just sitting and reading contracts,” he said. “What I found very exciting was the fact that [real estate] felt like it was fast paced.” 

He liked the aspect of buying and selling, and he wondered why some properties sold so much more quickly than others. This was his light bulb moment: He realized it came down to design.

Avdoo started flipping properties soon after. Using seed money from friends, he purchased a house in Jamaica, Queens, and renovated it himself. It sold quickly and he was on to the next, renovating 20 to 30 homes, all in Queens, he said. Avdoo got to a place where he could start hiring people to help renovate and sell those homes, and then moved into developing one- to three-family projects. Because he didn’t have much capital behind him, it was important that the properties he was developing sold quickly, and that’s where he began to lean on what’s become Avdoo’s calling card: an attention to detail and good design.

Then came 2008. 

Working in finance, Avdoo had learned enough about mortgages to see that the market was about to collapse. He finished and sold all of his properties, but also knew a market correction was an opportunity for him to once again level up. He set his sights on Brooklyn, and opened an office at the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights a week after Lehman Brothers collapsed. It marked the beginning of Avdoo, the development company, in earnest.

Taking flight 

Since its founding in 2008, Avdoo has flourished in its embrace of design. 

“What he wants to do is raise the bar of what new construction represents,” said Kapito, who’s working with Avdoo and RAMSA on the East 71st Street project. New construction has become “like airline travel, where it’s so watered down that the experience is just, like, not great. And he wants to bring it back up again.”

In her experience working with Avdoo, he allows her creative control and a somewhat flexible time frame. “I’ve never been told by another client, ‘Take your time, get it right.’ He has an appreciation for design that’s super rare.”

It helps that the company has the chops to see the details through.

Since its inception, Avdoo has been vertically integrated, meaning everything from design to construction to marketing happens in-house (with outside collaboration from the likes of Kapito). While there are currently about 30 people working on the design development side, Avdoo estimates about 100 people work on its construction side.

“Construction is one of our biggest strengths today,” Avdoo said. “One of the most difficult things for developers is execution and often where developers fail, because they’re not able to execute on schedule and on budget.” When everything happens in-house, he said, things are a lot more seamless.

Avdoo’s Bergen development in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, was designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo with interiors by the borough’s own Workstead. Today the 105-condo development, which launched sales in 2024, is over 80 percent sold.

When Avdoo tapped Escobedo, “she was just an architect in Mexico City” with a “really small city studio,” Avdoo said. 

“Identifying and working with these emerging architects that are super talented, that maybe some developers move away from working with because their studios are too small,” Avdoo said, “for us, that is the opportunity.” In 2022, Escobedo was announced as the architect for the forthcoming Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What Avdoo has learned that what buyers want right now — on top of good, thoughtful and unique design — is outdoor space, exposure to light and air, and privacy. Avdoo’s current project at 110 Boerum Place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, a 21-condo building with architecture and interiors by Brent Buck, will offer just that when it’s complete this year. It hit the market two months ago, Avdoo said, and is over 50 percent sold. The company is also at work on a Gowanus, Brooklyn, rental building, its first rental since 2000, designed by Morris Adjmi. Beyond that, the focus is on Manhattan.

“We have a long history of being patient and building strong relationships to acquire properties in super tight environments,” Avdoo said. “Today, Manhattan is arguably the toughest market for available inventory to build, so working with this pipeline feels especially rewarding.”

Building trust

In Avdoo’s leveling up, it has consistently worked with Valley National Bank to finance its projects. 

“[Shlomi] actually came recommended by someone I knew very well, who asked me a few times to take a risk,” said Christopher Gregg, the bank’s first senior vice president and department head of New York commercial real estate. It’s always a risk working with a new developer, not knowing how honest they are or if they’re capable of executing a project, he said. 

That was over a decade ago.

The risk paid off. Since then, Valley National has worked on a handful of projects with Avdoo, providing an $89 million construction loan for a 100-condo development on St. Marks Place in Brooklyn, a $105 million construction loan for Bergen, a $47 million construction loan for 110 Boerum Place, a $52 million purchase loan for East 71st Street, and supporting the $63 million purchase of 68 King Street. 

Gregg is glad he took his friend’s recommendation. It came from “someone I knew and trusted, and, over time, I’ve built the same relationship with Shlomi.”

Gregg also said Avdoo’s wife, Devora, once told him they calculated how many hours a week he spends on projects, and “basically, she thinks he’s insane. But he loves what he’s doing.”

Outside of work, Avdoo ferries his four children to various activities and sports practices — his youngest, 16-year-old twin boys, are very into tennis, he said — and volunteers with Project Sunshine, a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers into hospitals to play with children with medical needs. The Avdoos live on the south shore of Long Island, but when the twins go off to college, the couple plans to relocate to the East 71st Street project.

Avdoo said he tries to give back not only in his personal life but also in his professional life. For him, the reward is not how much he can make on a project, but creating homes for people in a market that he doesn’t foresee having enough market-rate or affordable units to meet demand anytime soon.

“That is the most rewarding thing,” he said. “That is the driver that makes [me] wake up in the morning.”

Driven by data center construction, the region’s pipeline — which includes Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland — grew from 6.2 million square feet to 13.2 million square feet year-over-year, according to a new national market report by CommercialSearch. The additions vaulted the market from 15th largest to fifth largest in the country in less than a year, per the report. Only Houston and Chicago’s industrial markets added more new space to their respective pipelines in the past 12 months. 

The DMV’s projected inventory expansion of 7 percent, in a tie with Austin, Texas, is largest among the largest 20 markets surveyed in the report. 

Nearly half of all industrial space underway in the region is data center space. Northern Virginia, Loudoun County in particular, has long been the nation’s biggest data center hub due to its proximity to the nation’s capital, ease of development and robust fiber optic and grid networks. Available land in the county trades hands for remarkable prices as a result, yet rapidly shrinking inventory and increasingly strict regulations are forcing data center development further south. More than 30 projects are in development across a 70-mile southern stretch from Loudoun’s Leesburg to the independent city of Manassas, per the report. 

“This area of Virginia also remains the world’s largest data center market by operating capacity, but how much further it can grow will depend on whether the grid can keep up because power availability is becoming as binding a constraint as land,” the report said.

Meanwhile, Southern California’s Inland Empire region — the nation’s largest warehouse market — is continuing to shrink due to pandemic-era oversupply and macroeconomic anxieties. The region’s pipeline has substantially dwindled over at least the past three years, from 19.4 million square feet under construction in early 2024, to 8.1 million square feet in late 2025, to just 6.5 million square feet by mid-March, per separate CommercialSearch reports. In early 2024, the Inland Empire’s pipeline was ranked fourth in the nation in terms of size; by early 2026, it was ranked 13th. 

Still, industrial properties in the Inland Empire are fetching eye-popping prices. In November, Bridge Logistics Properties paid $174 million for a 1.1 million-square-foot facility in Fontana. Last April, Burlington spent $257 million for a nearly 900,000-square-foot warehouse in Riverside. 

In terms of the national development pipeline, Amazon reigns supreme. The e-commerce titan owns seven of the 20 largest industrial projects cutting the ribbon this year, including a 3.5 million-square-foot facility near Denver, and a 3.4 million-square-foot property near Madison, Wis. It also claims ownership of a 2.5 million-square-foot development in Hesperia, Calif., the only Inland Empire development included on CommercialSearch’s top 20 list.

Nick Trombola can be reached at [email protected].

Coworking firm Industrious will expand its presence at Kato International’s Tower 49 from 240,000 square feet across 16 floors to 291,600 square feet across 18 floors, with the landlord declaring the tower is now the largest flexible office location in the world.

Industrious originally established its partnership with Kato to develop and operate the Midtown coworking space in June 2024, after WeWork was able to get out of its 300,000-square-foot lease obligations in the building. WeWork’s departure was part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, which were coming to an end around the time.

The new deal adds 51,600 square feet and puts Industrious in charge of almost half of the 600,000-square-foot office building at 12 East 49th Street in a redevelopment initiative prompted by the landlord. The location will become Industrious’ Midtown flagship.

“This expansion builds on the momentum already underway at Tower 49,” Robert Bakst, asset manager and exclusive agent of Kato, said in a statement. “By bringing together best-in-class partners and investing at scale, we are strengthening the building’s position in Midtown and creating long-term value for tenants and ownership.”

Industrious will operate workspaces, conference rooms and convention spaces across 18 floors of the midblock building on 49th Street between Madison and Fifth avenues, including two new amenity floors, according to the landlord. In addition, the 24th floor will be “reimagined” as a social lounge for the entire building and will include showers, a parenting suite, and event and programming spaces. Industrious’ redevelopment at the property is set to be completed by the fourth quarter of this year.

“This is the most ambitious project we’ve ever taken on,” Gentry Long, newly promoted president of Industrious, said in a statement. “Operating at this scale lets us fully invest in what a workplace can be — high-tech meeting spaces, new kinds of amenities, and on-site services that raise the bar for hospitality. This level of ambition only works with a partner like Kato. At Tower 49, we’re showing what can happen when an owner and operator are aligned on fully reinvesting in a Midtown office experience.”

Similar partnership deals struck between the landlord and service providers at Tower 49 include ​​Bonetti Kozerski Architecture, architecture firm MdeAS Architects, branding firm Mucca, and hospitality advisory firm Friend of Chef, which provides food and beverage options for workers at the building.

Mark Hallum can be reached at [email protected].

Now, industrial outdoor storage (IOS) may have a new point of differentiation driving up rents and property values.  

It’s part of the growth in demand for powered land for more real estate asset classes such as logistics hubs and data centers, and it’s called electrified industrial outdoor storage, or EIOS. Investors have already taken note. 

“Tenants are looking for the ‘three P’s’ — people, place and power,” said Chad Tredway, global head of real estate for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, who has been focused on powered sites for advanced manufacturing.

Proponents of this particular property play see rising demand for plots with excess electrical capacity for everything from EV charging depots and powered parking for self-driving vehicle fleets to spaces that can be converted to support advanced manufacturing facilities of at least 500,000 square feet. Traditionally, unsexy IOS sites, typically located deep in the industrial zones in and around cities, tend to be near power lines or have excess power capacity, a previously underappreciated characteristic that’s making property investors give these sites a closer look. 

“As opposed to buying land for equipment rental companies or lumber laydown yards, investors are seeing opportunities like autonomous trucking or autonomous cars,” said Justin Horowitz, senior managing director of Cooper-Horowitz, a financing firm active in the IOS space. “It’s just another asset class within IOS that’s becoming popular.”

A new JLL analysis underscores how much, as the report puts it, the mantra of “location, location, location” is increasingly giving way to “location, resilience, reliability.” In Silicon Valley, for instance, sites capable of meeting significant power demand — roughly 4,000 amps or more — are commanding 49 percent higher rents than standard industrial leases, a premium above and beyond new construction. Bringing ample electrification to your site can bring in a whole new type of tenant. 

Tredway said he’s seeing tenants willing to pay a 20 to 30 percent rent premium for a turnkey asset with power already in place. Even at those higher rents, demand is strong, executives at other companies say.

“Attractive, powered land locations that are already zoned for industrial near major urban areas are already hot commodities,” said Josephine Tucker, a JLL managing director and head of its energy advisory. “The absorption rate is tremendously high in this space — over 99 percent.”

The market for this type of power-supplied IOS really emerged in the last 18 months, said Max Heiden, a partner at Catalyst Investment Partners, a sector-specific real estate manager that owns about 140 IOS properties up and down the East Coast. Before, demand was mostly confined to West Coast markets, where there was a regulatory push that raised demand for more EV chargers, and in Texas, where a number of startups were moving forward with autonomous, electric trucking.

But, in the last year and a half, Heiden said that what he calls “new age electrified uses” have started seeking property: EV charging, autonomous vehicles (AV), and firms adjacent to the AI and data center buildout industries looking for storage space. They all share a desire for industrial-zoned real estate with lots of power and outdoor storage near population centers. 

“The quote-unquote popping of the EV bubble has not taken these players out of the market in terms of who’s looking for space,” said Heiden. “We definitely view it as a major category going forward.” 

Heiden predicted that AV storage alone could soon comprise 20 percent of Catalyst’s portfolio. Catalyst just launched a $400 million equity fund in February, and Heiden expects AV- and EV-focused buys will be a significant part of the fund’s acquisition strategy. 

“I think that the alternatives market is one of the hottest new areas in real estate right now,” said Tucker. “Prologis and Brookfield have already been thinking about the relationship between energy resources and operational real estate in logistics or manufacturing. But we’re starting to see that trickle out in terms of other investors starting new funds — for example, manufacturing logistics with energy infrastructure as a specific requirement in fundraising.”

Tredway said J.P. Morgan Asset Management is looking at the potential for advanced manufacturing and robotics, which he sees as a growing source of industrial demand. He cites a recent project his team worked on in Houston for a major electronics manufacturer, developing a 112-acre site with two 380,000-square-foot buildings into an advanced manufacturing site. It’s expected to open in late 2026.   

Tredway also has Southern California, Texas and Phoenix on his radar for these kinds of investments. Those markets have benefited from government stimulus for industries, such as the CHIPS Act bolstering microchip manufacturing, and they have both a base of talent and deep ties in sectors like defense and aerospace, which attract suppliers in need of new facilities.  

While manufacturing employment is down, it’s a mixed signal for real estate, because increased automation and robotics mean companies can do more with less. Tredway said leasing for manufacturing space has actually been growing at a 50 percent compound annual rate since 2018. 

As investment flows to these EIOS sites, and turns what was traditional truck parking and storage spaces to newer uses, it’ll exacerbate the existing supply crunch around IOS property in general. That could further increase prices. 

Demand for urban, highway-adjacent storage — previously the domain of waste management firms, logistics, utility companies and commercial landscapers — has been supercharged by the evolving needs of deep-pocketed tech firms. Tredway has found that cap rates for IOS are 50 to 150 basis points above traditional industrial uses, but those are compressing as sites become harder to find. 

“It’s just more fuel on the fire for the supply crunch story,” said Heiden. “There is a fixed or declining amount of this inventory.” 

This new, more high-tech use case for IOS is also emerging as the IOS space at large becomes more institutionalized, said Horowitz. Over the past 24 months, he said there’s been a real push to institutionalize IOS as an investment option amid growing interest from players like J.P. Morgan, Clarion Partners and Peakstone Realty Trust. 

“There’s a lot of positive momentum in IOS,” said Horowitz. “It still feels like the early days for investors. There’s more institutional capital coming into the space on the equity side, and all the aggregators over the past several years have built tremendous portfolios.”

Demand for these sites will continue to rise as voracious data center growth looks back toward urban and suburban sites. There’s even growing, albeit limited, use of these sites to store large, industrial-size batteries to help power other projects, said Leo Addimando, CEO and managing partner of Alterra Property Group, a major investor and developer in the space.

As the massive rural and exurban data center campuses continue to refine and evolve AI models and their commercial applications, tech firms will start investing more and more in data centers nearer to users — so-called edge computing — to help curb or eliminate delays in consumer applications like chatbots. 

Industry analysts at advisory firm Proptech Connection predict this type of edge and inference traffic from AI will grow 25 percent between 2024 and 2027. Daniel English, managing investor of real estate investment firm Legacy Investing, predicts 10x growth of edge data centers between now and 2030. Catalyst IOS’s Heiden has seen IOS land being turned over for this use over the last two years in particular. 

That may put data centers and advanced manufacturing in competition with each other, said JLL’s Tucker. Advanced manufacturing already has a number of site constraints. Ideally, its backers want it near transportation routes like rail, connected to a larger distribution network, and also close to talent and work crews. At the same time, advanced manufacturing, like EIOS, functions best with copious power. There’s opportunity for on-site generation at these industrial sites, said Tucker, but there will still be demand for more electricity.  

The scramble for powered sites has complicated zoning and utility hookups, said J.P. Morgan’s Tredway. There are growing pains, too, as utilities try to meet demand and prioritize the right projects, and municipalities deal with rising electricity rates and industrial development that can even crowd out uses like much-needed housing construction.  

Tucker said many users are looking at battery storage to cut costs. For an industrial tenant, energy can account for up to 20 percent of the total operation costs. 

But, even as grid dynamics, electrification and technology become more central to the economy, the evolving EIOS story suggests the land where all this activity takes place still carries significant value. 

“Boil it down to the high-barrier-to-entry things,” said Heiden. “It’s location, zoning and proximity to the population. It’s all a real estate game.”