Editor’s note: Developerus secretus

Some of the biggest real estate players in New York fly so far under the radar that they might as well be in the witness protection program.

It’s almost an urban legend: The shadowy developer who builds whole chunks of the city but has never been seen in public.

In this issue, we profile a classic example of this developerus secretus species, Simon Dushinsky of the Rabsky Group, who is one of the most prolific builders in Brooklyn, in a story starting on page 36.

His firm has no website. There are no known photos of him. And he has never talked to the press during his roughly 25-year career, which dates back to the early 1990s.

Based in Williamsburg and part of the Hasidic community, he has projects including the massive 775-unit rental complex planned for the former Pfizer site in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Reportedly a zoning whiz, his firm has benefitted from the dramatic run-up in Brooklyn property values and is now expanding to new neighborhoods, making it harder for the company to hide behind LLCs and tight-lipped lawyers.

He is hardly the first wildly successful developer in New York to hide in plain sight. Until The Real Deal wrote about him in the mid aughts, hotel developer Sam Chang had barely a mention in the press, despite being solely responsible for more than half of all of the under-construction hotel units in Manhattan at the time (the pipeline was a lot smaller than it is today). And the infamous Ring Brothers — Frank and Michael — who inherited 15 Manhattan office buildings worth $500 million from their father, but mysteriously and inexplicably left many of the prime sites vacant, were relative unknowns before being revealed in these pages several years ago.

But my favorite example is developer Leonard Litwin of Glenwood Management, who is now 100 years old and who has been the largest political donor on the state level for the past 10 years. Despite his enormous influence on the future of New York, the secretive billionaire who has been building since the 1950s has had virtually zero public presence for decades. This is despite the fact that his firm has recently surfaced in connection with the criminal case against former state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who’s accused of steering Glenwood and another developer to a law firm that gave him a cut of their fees. (Glenwood has not been accused of wrongdoing.) 

The list goes on, with other huge players like investor David Werner (the biggest buyer of NYC real estate in 2014), and the heirs of property magnate Sol Goldman, who control his massive holdings. Someone really needs to get all these guys together — maybe a dinner party with D.B. Cooper and J.D. Salinger at an unmarked speakeasy somewhere would be fitting (plus a reporter with a notebook in tow).

Elsewhere in this issue, our main cover story is about a group that doesn’t typically shy away from the limelight — namely, brokers. (There is a reason that there are so many reality shows about residential real estate.)

We take our annual look at the biggest residential brokerages in Manhattan, plus the top mid-sized firms and boutiques, in stories starting on page 42. Douglas Elliman led the pack when it came to the biggest firms, while Sotheby’s dominated among mid-sized firms, followed by hot tech upstart brokerage Compass, which has received tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. On the boutique list, superbroker Dolly Lenz’s five-person firm took the top spot with the highest dollar volume of listings.

The competition for market share amid high prices and still relatively low inventory (along with VC money changing the brokerage landscape) has led to some pretty epic rivalries among firms. Check out our cover story on the biggest battles on page 40.

We’ve also got stories on the best performing private equity funds (page 54), a ranking of tech start-ups and how much they’ve raised (page 62), a comprehensive look at hotel projects in the works in Manhattan (page 60) and a look at how Chinese players are going about partnering with New York City developers (page 100).

Finally, get ready for TRD’s New Development Showcase & Forum on May 12 in Chelsea.  Once again, we are bringing real estate’s top names together (those who aren’t press shy, anyway) for panel discussions on the industry’s biggest issues including Chinese investment, crowdfunding and the future of the luxury development market. For more info, check out therealdeal.com/forum.

Enjoy the issue.