Baller: Jasper Wu pursues calling as family firm dives into Manhattan

Founder marked company for scion’s arrival from outset

Jasper Wu, ZD Jasper Take Shot at Manhattan Condo Market

ZD Jasper Realty's Jasper Wu (Illustration by Kevin Rebong for The Real Deal with Getty)

Orion Jones

Apr 21, 2024, 8:00 AMUpdated Apr 22, 2024, 7:30 AM

What’s in a name? For Jasper Wu, his real estate destiny.

Great Neck-based ZD Jasper has borne his name since his father Tom Zhidong Wu founded it in 1996, around the time Jasper might have learned to ride a bike or dribble a basketball.

As a message about where his son might find a career, it did not lack clarity.

Like a lot of real estate scions, however, Jasper Wu did not go straight from graduation (Cornell, Columbia Business School) to the family firm. He had gigs at accounting giant EY as a robotics consultant and at the NBA analyzing rule changes and referee integrity.

Since joining ZD Jasper in 2019 and learning the business from various angles — he is certified as a chartered financial analyst, construction superintendent, site safety supervisor and general contractor — the 31-year-old vice president has helped take his father’s Queens-centric company in a new direction: west, to Manhattan.

Despite rising interest rates and a stagnant market for land, the developer managed to buy several sites from Gary Barnett’s Extell Development in 2022 and 2023 for $122 million. On those sites, Jasper plans to build 390 condominium apartments.

Those units could fetch more than $1 billion, based on the $2.7 million median price of new condos in Manhattan during March, according to data firm Marketproof.

Most are in Hudson Yards: 185 units are underway as part of a passive house project at 501 Ninth Avenue, nearly 130 are planned at 430 West 37th Street and 52 units are coming to 439 West 36th Street. A boutique condo project on the Upper East Side, the central borough’s busiest area for new development, rounds out the Manhattan pipeline.

Bob Knakal, who represented Extell in the Hudson Yards deals, said the younger Wu “was on top of all the details and was very much involved.”

“He has potential,” said developer George Xu. “With the Manhattan expansion, he is moving in the right direction.”

Queens gambit

Just after Jasper joined ZD Jasper, according to his LinkedIn page, the company completed a 58-unit condo project at 5 Court Square in Long Island City that got a shout out in the New York Times.

The project is one of 11 that ZD Jasper has completed in Queens, alongside a close-knit circle of Asian real estate professionals who favor the outer borough. Among them are architect Raymond Chan, investor Jerry Pi, George Xu and his brother Chris Jiashu Xu, who built One Skyline Tower, the tallest building in Queens.

“ZD Jasper projects have tended to be designed for the Chinese buyer,” said Michael Bethoney, director of new development at Nest Seekers International, which ZD Jasper tapped to sell 5 Court Square, 45-30 Pearson Street (130 units) and 27-19 Thomson Avenue (34 units).

Bethoney plays weekly games of pickup basketball in Long Island City with Jasper, who declined to be interviewed. “Jasper’s a pretty good shot,” he noted.

That appears to be the case in the development world, too. Despite the industry’s many pitfalls, The Real Deal could find no record of bankruptcies, foreclosures or scandals involving ZD Jasper, and just a single lawsuit against it, from a neighbor at its West 36th Street property.

While Jasper’s father had experience developing real estate in China, upon arriving in the U.S. in 1991 he began a computer sales and servicing business that remains in operation. The earliest record TRD could find of ZD Jasper in New York City was in 1996, the year of its founding. It purchased a four-story commercial building in Midtown South, at 18 West 38th Street, which it still owns.

Records indicate the firm did not become a prolific builder until the mid-2010s. However, the use of limited liability companies in real estate can make knowing all of any developer’s activity a challenge. On its website, ZD Jasper says it has built a dozen buildings with more than 1,000 units in all.

Today, some condo developers have pressed the brakes on projects, given high borrowing costs and uncertainty in the lending market.

“Everyone is laying low because it’s tough out there,” said Jerry Pi of Pi Capital Partners, a father-son business based in Flushing with projects in Queens and Manhattan. “The feds are coming down hard on the banks, and debt funds are expensive.”

Still, ZD Jasper has found a way to buy sites and start ground-up development. “ZD Jasper is a quick builder,” Pi noted, “and that’s their advantage.”

Jasper has appeared little in public. One exception, a promotional video he shot for a job listings website, revealed that ZD Jasper prefers its workers can speak Mandarin. The requirement speaks to the importance of culture at the company, which has special access to certain public and private contracts as a minority-owned business.

More than a decade ago, Jasper gave his college newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, a glimpse of the philosophies that may explain his push into Manhattan — a market known for competitiveness, complexity, risks and rewards.

“Any chess player knows that you have to think ahead,” Jasper, who was president of Cornell’s chess club, said in 2012. “It’s important to make a strategy and think things through.”

Another lesson from the game that he seems to have applied to his real estate career is that failure is inevitable, and not a reason to avoid taking chances.

“It is impossible to never lose a game in chess,” he told the newspaper, “just as it is impossible to never make a mistake in life.”

New York