Everyone needs a guiding light. It doesn’t matter if you’re the child of billionaires, as developer Shanna Khan is: Individual wisdom is still hard-won.
“Earlier in my life, I was focused on mitigating regret,” Khan, head of Shanna Collective, reflected to Chicago Bureau Chief and Senior Reporter Sam Lounsberry in March at an interview in her office. The daughter of Pakistan’s wealthiest man secured hundreds of millions in institutional financing at a terrible time for Chicago’s commercial market and hung on when others stalled. Her pockets may be deep, but this venture isn’t just self-funded, and she’s earned faith from investors and partners. With one-third of her Fulton Market building left to lease, she told Lounsberry, “I operate with the intensity and mindset that everything is on the line.” Read more about her here.
She’s not the only succession story in this month’s magazine. In 2019, Jeffrey Soffer split from his family business, Turnberry. Francisciso Alvarado tells the story of how he’s aggressively carried and expanded his multibillion-dollar part of the real estate empire, which revolves around two Fontainebleau hotels in Las Vegas and Miami Beach, and, now, a giant waterslide.
Not everyone’s grip is so tight.
Josh Schuster, a once-promising developer, spent years denying that he’d stolen money from a Gramercy Park development. Early this year, he pled guilty to a $13 million “Ponzi-like scheme,” and Senior Reporter Rich Bockmann spins out the tale of his victims, who are trying to recover what they lost.
Since the Department of Justice released its latest Jeffrey Epstein files, our reporters have produced stories about the convicted sex trafficker’s real estate holdings. But the deals didn’t always make sense financially. Our latest explains what Epstein got from real estate dealmaking. It wasn’t just money.
“I operate with the intensity and mindset that everything is on the line.”
Meanwhile, the year is a quarter of the way through, enough time for the market’s breezes to organize into trends. A war in Iran has brought a supply shock, and with oil prices up — and the second-order effects of expensive energy becoming clear — industry optimism about lower interest rates has fallen. So have stock market indexes, thanks to worries about white-collar jobs in the age of artificial intelligence. Still, in New York City, office leasing volume almost hit last year’s first-quarter record, according to JLL. An AI firm signed for the highest per-square-foot price ever paid, at One Vanderbilt. Silverstein Properties figured out how to get 2 World Trade Center built, with American Express as anchor. In San Francisco, tech and AI animated the city’s oldest business district, Jackson Square, where onlookers now expect excess demand to lift nearby commercial areas; Christopher Neely has a piece about that. In New York, the good times have flowed to retail, and this month we look at how new independent brokerages are getting coveted assignments with luxury brands — that’s here.
The good indicators haven’t stopped Texas and Florida from enticing blue state companies and their highly paid workers.
When Palantir’s Alex Karp bought a Miami Beach home and moved his firm’s headquarters from Denver, Florida boosters gave themselves another pat on their back. Lidia Dinkova untangles whether the lease, which is for a modest space, is mostly hype or a real signal for the office market.
And, Isaiah Mitchell profiles a former Google executive who built spec houses for tech leaders in Menlo Park, based on a knack for knowing his customer. He’s now in Dallas trying to do it again for a new class of finance honchos he hopes will come work on Y’all Street.
That’s to say nothing of the politics. The Senate passed a version of a pro-housing bill mid-March that contained a not-so-pro-housing surprise: regulation of what kind of homes corporations can own, as well as how many and for how long. Thinkers on both sides of this issue go deeper than the headlines in The Debate. And, Senior Reporter Kathyrn Brenzel looks at how homeownership, a key goal in most places, became a political thorn in New York. Read her piece here.
Hope you enjoy the issue!