In the airy bar of the Fairmont Century Plaza hotel, David Reuben Jr. seemed uncomfortable.
By all accounts, he should not have been. A snapshot of the scene would have fit nicely in his Instagram grid: the 44-year-old scion of the billionaire Reuben dynasty holding court at a loungy low table, dressed down in jeans and sneakers, swaddled by a swank setting on a late Los Angeles afternoon.
And yet, his shoulders hunched and his right leg bounced. He sucked on a vape, double-fisted a Diet Coke and used the moments his mouth was free to talk a broker and this reporter through his onus: the execution of the $2.5 billion Century Plaza project.
The development comprises a crescent-shaped hotel — historically, to the stars — that now holds a few dozen high-end rentals, plus twin luxury condo towers backed by a retail-lined courtyard. Century Plaza has easy access to the busy Westfield Mall; otherwise, it’s a concrete islet at the base of suburban Beverly Hills and within the booming office hub that is Century City. The neighborhood has bucked the office distress story, luring law firms and financial companies; it is home to the 50-acre Fox Studio Lot, slated for an expansion that would nearly double its size.
When Reuben and I met in September, it had been more than a year since the principal had volunteered to head up the development his father, David, and uncle, Simon — the Reuben Brothers — had taken back through foreclosure.
The developer, Michael Rosenfeld, had worked for over a decade to revamp the hotel and add the two towers before defaulting on $1.8 billion in debt.
Reuben had made little visible progress since. We passed no residents during a walkthrough of the North Tower and the storefronts were still dusty caverns.
But Reuben, leading the frenetic tour, was focused on what would be: the Tony Robbins-backed longevity center, al fresco dining and humming pedestrian pathways to the Westfield Mall.
If Reuben’s body language betrayed some nerves, it could have been because the Century Plaza is a first for him. The principalt has 20 years of real estate experience and eight running credit for his family, but he’s never lead a project of this scale or type.
And the project isn’t just any undertaking, it’s a kaleidoscopic acid test — for high-rise living in a mansion-loving town, for live-work-play in the office-centric Century City and for the Reubens in Los Angeles (this is their first piece of real estate in the city proper).
That’s a lot for anyone to shoulder, but especially for the eldest son of a family business empire who has publicly shied from an official role. When hashtags ruled Instagram a few years back, Reuben frequently captioned family shots with #BlackSheep. (Reuben said the label was an inside joke among his music industry friends as he was the only finance guy.) In a birthday post this year for his brother Jamie, who heads the firm’s hospitality arm, Reuben called his sibling “my mentor and older brother.” Jamie is six years younger.
“Clearly, I have a lot of personal, emotional and intellectual investment in making sure that the project’s an immense success. So does my whole family.”
“He’s so successful and intelligent, it’s like I look up to him in so many ways,” Reuben said in a later interview. “I hope he looks up to me in a few ways, too.”
As the Reuben family patriarchs wade well into succession-planning age, Century Plaza is a chance for Reuben to show he’s more than a grateful nepo baby, that he is an heir with the skill and energy to steer his family’s multinational firm.
During a November Zoom call in which Reuben opted for no video — he said he was in a swimsuit heading into a vacation — the principal stammered for a moment when asked what was at stake with Century Plaza.
“Clearly, I have a lot of personal, emotional and intellectual investment in making sure that the project’s an immense success,” he said. “So does my whole family.”
So far, so…
To be sure, the Reubens care about Century Plaza. They spent $1 billion in a credit bid to take the project back and stuck out a two-year legal battle to hang onto it.
But if the deal flops, they’re not losing their shirts.
The United Kingdom-based brothers have a combined net worth of $15.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their real estate holdings include Millbank Tower by London’s Thames River and the Surrey hotel and retail condo on Fifth Avenue in New York. They have a very active debt arm — they hold the loans on the Plaza Hotel, for one. And the firm has pieced together an investment empire that spans a shipping fleet, data centers, mines, the London Oxford Airport and the football club Newcastle United.
They’ve also staged an aggressive expansion into the United States post-pandemic, picking up discounted New York retail, refinancing big-name projects such as Gary Barnett’s Central Park Tower and diving into Miami Beach hospitality with the W South Beach.
Success in the States is top of mind, though it’s too soon to say whether Century Plaza is tracking toward a win.
The project is a four-piece puzzle: the 726-room Fairmont Century Plaza hotel; its 63 branded luxury rentals, the Residences; the two 44-story Park Elm condo towers, totaling 268 units; and the 100,000 square feet of space for shops and restaurants at their base.
Reuben has made most evident progress on the bit he’s most familiar with: retail.
He cut his teeth on commercial leases and sales. After a short stint at Colliers, he founded the real estate firm River Investment Group at 23. His first deal was cleaning up leases on German Lidl and Aldi supermarkets, piecing stores together to build €20 million portfolios and selling those off to investment firms and private banks.
The work earned him a “Property Newcomer of the Year” award in 2007 by Property Week, which said at 27, he had “emerged from under the shadows” of his billionaire father and uncle.
It wasn’t exactly a boot-strap operation — Reuben tapped the patriarchs for launch capital four years earlier, according to British commercial property newspaper the Estates Gazette.
A spokesperson said neither David Reuben Sr. nor Simon Reuben were involved in River; rather, David co-founded the firm with two partners and tapped “external investors.” Deutsche Bank acquired a majority stake in the asset-management business in 2005 after River had reached £1 billion in AUM.
“I just see [Century City] as a great opportunity to show what I can do.”
Then, Reuben cut a different path, opening the boutique investment firm Blackship Advisors — not a play on “black sheep,” according to the principal — to pursue projects that “I don’t think fit the Reuben Brothers profile perfectly,” he said. Those included restaurants and restaurant tech. Reuben is an investor in Marc Lotenberg’s Dorsia, an app that allows members to snag coveted reservations and invites to exclusive events.
Take that experience and those connections, transfer them to Century Plaza and you get the 47,000 square feet of leases Reuben has signed in the past year — about half of the total retail space.
The principal inked three restaurant hot spots — Estiatorio Milos, Miami’s Kyu and New York’s Sushi Noz — to the tune of 21,200 square feet.
He signed Wally’s Wine & Spirits, a liquor store turned gourmet food and dining outpost under the ownership of Guess Jeans founding brothers Paul and Maurice Marciano for a combined 4,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space. And he brought in the Estate, a health and longevity clinic created by SBE’s Sam Nazarian in partnership with Tony Robbins’ wellness brand Fountain Life, for 13,000 square feet.
As for the remainder — one anchor space and a few smaller units — Reuben said he expects the firm may use “some of our concepts” to fill the vacancies, pointing to the Reuben Brothers-owned and London-based luxury shopping mall Burlington Arcade.
Tough market
Those deals may be closing behind the scenes, but Century Plaza in September still had that new car smell, an unboxed feel.
In a former life, the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel hosted the Apollo 11 astronauts at a state dinner held by President Richard Nixon, then the Grammys, the Emmys and Sonny & Cher, nightly. President Ronald Reagan went to the hotel so much in the ’80s that reporters called it the “Western White House.”
In September, a few guests sat at the marble slab bar or clustered on cushy chairs near the open floor-to-ceiling windows. To head through those apertures onto the back courtyard where the Park Elm condos stand was to find yourself alone on white-hot cement.
That’s because the towers that the Reubens took over in early 2023 are only 32 percent sold, the principal said in December. It’s a modest figure made less impressive by the fact that their developer Rosenfeld handed over the keys to 115 Park Circle and 211 Elm Court with 26 percent of the units in contract.
Reuben, through a spokesperson, countered that the firm has been “deeply involved” in the project for “many years — long before taking full ownership.”
The minimal progress isn’t for lack of trying. Reuben tapped the Agency to head sales back in August 2023 and slapped the Park Elm name on the towers a few months later. He celebrated the rebranding with a party in one of the 360-degree penthouses his team built out for the event. Reuben, a Burning Man frequenter, or Burner, booked the electronic duo Bob Moses to DJ.
Since, Reuben’s spokesperson said the team has worked to “better connect with luxury buyers worldwide” and expanded its offerings with the Residences — luxury rentals tucked into and serviced by the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel. As of November, Reuben said 30 percent of the 63 rentals were leased: “We’re tracking ahead of pro forma.”
For condo sales, there have been clear headwinds. Los Angeles’ Measure ULA property tax increase passed in April 2023, just as the Reubens were taking over the project. The rule adds a tax of 4 percent to properties that sell for at least $5.15 million, and 5.5 percent to those that sell for over $10.3 million.
Park Elm’s lower-floor condos, with asking prices starting at $1.8 million, are the ones that have sold; it’s the higher floors and penthouses priced at $10 million and up that have been harder to move — a sign that the legislation could be putting off the higher-dollar buyers. Demand for trophy apartments is down citywide. A year after the Reubens gained control of Park Elm and Measure ULA passed, residential sales above $5 million had fallen by nearly 70 percent year over year.
Reuben also said that his team didn’t want to flood his own market with the higher-tiered units — though the luxury condo towers have little competition in Century City. The principal said the firm is focused on “securing the right pricing” rather than achieving high sales volume.
“We’re intentionally pacing our sales process to align with the activation of key commercial elements like the restaurants and wellness clinic, which will significantly enhance the value of our estate residences and penthouses,” Reuben said in a statement.
In November, the principal reported recent progress in the North Tower — the one the team is concentrating on at the moment.
“We’ve sold five [condos] in the last six weeks — exactly tracking our pro forma,” Reuben said. “And offers are continually rising.”
Model resident
Reuben himself is living in the North Tower.
He moved from the Beverly Hills mansion he shared with his wife and son to manifest the life he’s curating for Century Plaza’s residents: safe, community-oriented and convenient.
“I handpicked the restaurants I thought would best service the lifestyle I live,” Reuben said at The Real Deal’s LA Forum. “Now that I’m living it, it’s much easier to sell it.”
Once the retail is leased — the restaurants, for example, are set to open this year — he said the condos will sell and that sleepy courtyard will buzz.
“When Century City doesn’t just become some place where people work, but a place where they go for dinner, experience their social lives and the prominence of the Fairmount gets additional highlighting in the L.A. consciousness, those apartments will be incredibly more valuable,” he said during the November interview. “I have no question in my mind about that.”
Reuben pitches Century City as a haven.
“We create these bubbles for ourselves from our houses, our apartments to our office to the restaurants we like, in a car and you kind of build your world inside L.A.,” Reuben said at the Forum.
“I think the word bubble can be reimagined when it comes to mixed-use developments,” he continued. “Here’s a bubble of your own.”
The bubble language evokes the promise of safety in a city that has worried about violent crime and homelessness, despite data which shows that homicides, property crimes and counts of homeless individuals have ticked down since 2021. Civic concern reached a crescendo when District Attorney George Gascón, a progressive raked over the coals for public safety issues, was bested by former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman.
Middle child
Throughout the Zoom interview with Reuben, it was evident that despite his headlining role with a $1 billion project, he is still working for the family firm.
He declined to talk about his specific ambitions, instead relying on generalities.
“When I do something, I make sure that the family are fully behind me because I want to represent my family as proudly as I can,” Reuben said.
He used the word “family” 40 times in a 50-minute interview.
David and Simon Reuben are now both in their 80s, an age at which the march of time invariably affects the look and feel of a family firm.
David Reuben Jr. is one of four heirs to the Reuben Brothers fortune and legacy. Simon has a daughter, Lisa. In addition to younger brother Jamie, Reuben has a sister Jordana who is two years older. That makes him the middle of three.
If you subscribe to birth order theory — research shows conflicting results — middle children are often overshadowed by siblings and overlooked by their parents. They can be excellent mediators but they may also experience self-doubt.
Reuben, when asked if he felt like a middle child, said he “didn’t know what middle children are meant to feel like.”
Then, he praised his brother: “I do not consider him to be a typical younger brother, given he’s so successful and intelligent.” Later, he extended the same admiration to his sister — “incredibly involved on the design side [of the business]” — and his cousin, who runs the Reuben art business and “has become one of the largest art buyers globally.”
Between his kind words and self-effacement, Reuben does not project the image of a power-hungry next-in-line but of a subservient son. When asked about succession planning, Reuben declined to speak out of turn.
“I think for me to comment on the internal working of my family probably is above my station,” he said.
The principal’s focus, as he would tell it, is more immediate. He’s trying to show two of the world’s wealthiest investors that he can hold his own as a real estate executive, and at the most basic level, make his family proud.
But to prove oneself is to work toward some end, which in Reuben’s case would likely be a leading role in Reuben Brothers 2.0. If the heir doesn’t reveal the same bloodthirst as other children of real estate royalty, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t share their ambition.
“I just see [Century City] as a great opportunity to show what I can do,” Reuben said.