Putting up a building is an act of faith in the future. You’d think the people who do it might be more comfortable planning for the future of their family businesses. Often that isn’t the case, and we’ve covered succession problems for years. But this issue has three stories of handovers that are actually going well.
For Ian Bruce Eichner, a longtime New York City and South Florida developer known for being unafraid of conflict, figuring out the future of his Continuum Companies started with lunch with his daughter, Alexandra, who at that time was working as a consultant.
“What’s the agenda?” she asked him. “There’s no casual lunch with you.”
Without officially calling it succession (Bruce is as present as ever), Alexandra has been climbing the ladder for more than five years. South Florida Bureau Chief and Senior Reporter Katherine Kallergis writes a portrait of Alexandra on the cusp of completing the first development she’s been on from start to finish.
Alex Witkoff became Witkoff Group CEO abruptly when the founder, dad Steve, joined the Trump administration in January. Alex’s brother Zach had also left for buzzier pastures — in his case, a crypto venture — shortly before.
As reporter Sheridan Wall writes, Alex had been training for years at the family company. Witkoff Group is behind some of the most ambitious projects we cover in Miami and New York, like One High Line and the Shore Club, and Alex, co-CEO with Steve for two years, is not unprepared. But he holds his cards close to the chest. “Perhaps his way is emblematic of a new generation rising in the ranks, one born to privilege, educated in the Ivy League and steeped in the idea of protecting a legacy created by someone more bombastic,” Wall writes.
The third is Jaime Lee, CEO of Los Angeles’ Jamison, who works with her parents and brothers at the family’s development firm. In this month’s The Closing column, she tells Senior Editor Lauren Schram her siblings would probably describe her as “bossy, maybe hyperbolic.”
Zoom over to North Texas, where the clairvoyant planner turned out to be a former Mavericks player named Ray Johnston. After his basketball career ended, Johnston became a country singer and then got into real estate.
He’s not unique in knowing that the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, whose population now matches New York City’s, was headed north. But Johnston managed to buy, add necessary infrastructure to and sell much of a 140-acre parcel just outside the nation’s fastest-growing city, a place called Princeton, in a way that makes it look like he had a crystal ball. In his first contribution to the magazine, reporter Isaiah Mitchell catches up with Johnston, whose aw-shucks nature belies strong business connections.
Inside the magazine, you’ll also find rankings of San Francisco brokers and brokerages, as well as Hamptons brokerages.
The whole point of placing a bet is that you don’t know what will happen next — but you win the money if you get it right. In our cover story, Senior Reporter Kathryn Brenzel sits down at the table with the developers in the running for the three state licenses for downstate New York casinos. Bids came in at the end of June, with victors to be picked in December. But as Brenzel reports, players might be hedging their bets more than they’ve let on, and losing might yield other wins.
August cues the end of summer, and we have our last batch of dedicated Hamptons coverage, which includes Jake Indursky’s profile of architect Thomas Juul-Hansen, who’s building what will be the most expensive spec home ever listed on the North Fork of Long Island. Kate Hinsche digs into agricultural land policy, making sense of a contradiction: The cheapest land in the Hamptons produces the most expensive fruit.
Late on a Monday at the end of July, a gunman entered Rudin’s office tower at 345 Park Avenue and killed four people: police officer Didarul Islam, security guard Aland Etienne, Rudin associate Julia Hyman and Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner. We followed the story as it happened and sought answers to hard questions about security in buildings that have always felt like cloisters. You can trust we’ll continue to stay ahead of the news on this, but what I keep thinking about is the futures stolen, for no reason, at a place of work.
Thanks for reading the issue.