Celebrities and real estate are easy if lazy bedfellows.
Most are satisfied with mailbox money. Some, post-retirement, get into the weeds when they retire — like A-Rod, now Mr. Florida Multifamily.
Few, though, fall in love with the actual grunt work.
Ryan Tedder did.
Most will know him as the lead singer of OneRepublic, the pop-rock band behind “Counting Stars,” an earworm of the early 2010s, “Apologize,” feat. Timbaland — another radio favorite. He’s sustained a decades-long career as a front man, songwriter and producer. He co-wrote Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning shimmery ballad “Halo,” Taylor Swift’s ode “Welcome to New York.” He has writing and producing credits on four of tracks of K-pop darling BTS’ album, “Arirang,” which was released in March.
At the same time, he’s custom-built a portfolio of commercial real estate that will soon top $1 billion in assets under management: 3 million square feet across 12 states and a menagerie of asset classes. He owns manufacturing in Wisconsin, apartment buildings in Florida, sweeping office holdings in Las Vegas, where he’s also developing “Halo Tower,” the area’s largest office building. Plus: a car wash, a Walgreens, an FBI building.
The underlying thesis is basic: Buy value-add “in places where people live and need to go do stuff.”
Tedder hard-launched himself as an investor in 2021. Rolling Stone covered the debut with a splashy Q&A. (He’d sold off a majority stake in his music catalogue a few months earlier, a sign of the shift to come.)
But he’s not new to the game. He taught himself the basics over the course of two decades, getting his start by reading how-to books on investing and asking around at Hollywood dinner parties for tips on where to put the money he made in music.
Now, the mentee is becoming the mentor.
Tedder is opening his partner pool to the network of connections he’s built during his grind in the industry by inviting and educating award-winning artists, disenchanted with the vicious cycle of musicmaking, to get in on what he envisions as a banner year for real estate deals.
He’s passionate about giving singers and songwriters an offramp from an industry that cannot provide a reliable paycheck.
At the same time, he’s fully embodying the role of the investor.
“He’s not a music guy who invests in real estate; he’s a real estate guy who invests in music,” Nelson Braff, one of Tedder’s repeat partners and close collaborators, said.
The Real Deal met Tedder on a Chinatown corner in mid-June to view his first whole-building purchase in Manhattan: a four-story office tower with a Citibank anchor at 168 Canal Street. Tedder and his partners paid $40.5 million for it, two-thirds of its previous sale price of $62 million in 2013. (A document for one partner in the deal, Datepalm Canal Holdings, was signed by Diana Carone, wife to Frank Carone, the former Eric Adams chief of staff who was arrested in June on federal bribery charges connected to a migrant shelter contract. Braff said the Carones were brought in by another partner.)
Even with the low price, the building could seem boring, but it’s an important pickup for an investor who’s made most of his money in second- and third-tier cities. (Tedder previously bought a retail condo in Carnegie Hill, which he sold recently; he still owns one of two condos he bought at The Witkoff Group and Fisher Brothers’ 111 Murray Street and a CVS on Metropolitan Avenue in Queens.)
To Tedder, the bank branch buy is a trend bet on New York. He’s of the mind that the perceived anti-real estate bent of the Mamdani administration will spook enough investors to create an opening in the market.
His guesstimate is that one in five investors — the “casual” kind — will step back, making space for him and others to step in.
“This is my theory,” the former New Yorker said during an on-camera interview for TRD. He imbued his confidence with a bit of humility — a key contrast of his character. “I don’t know how accurate this is.”
Taken in aggregate, it’s a huge move for an investor whose current New York City footprint consists only of a drugstore and a four-story value-add office building — and it offers a peek into what looks like the start of a grand real estate play.
Cross pollination
Tedder, 47, has been a working musician since the mid-’90s. He won his first Grammy for Adele’s sophomore album “21” — named after the songstress’ age — when he was only 32 and already wondering how long he could sustain himself on hitmaking. And over his tenure he’s built an ever-expanding universe of connections across music and business.
Those touchpoints are what he’s tapping to make real estate groove for him.
When I met Tedder at SummerStage in balmy (humid) Central Park, a few days before the solstice, it was about 20 minutes to set time. OneRepublic was playing a private show. Backstage, amid amped-up tech guys and lounging roadies, it was business as usual to Tedder. The audience was the financial services firm PwC.
He doesn’t get nervous, he said. The set list was routine: “Just the hits.” He’d just been scribbling across a table of autographs laid out like a game of Memory.
What was riling him up: investment potential.
“Literally, the last person I was speaking with is their head of office leasing,” he said of PwC.
“That is what’s fun about doing these gigs sometimes,” he added. A show with Home Depot or Walmart might evolve into a tête-à-tête on lease extensions in a market he just stopped in for a show. Say: Salt Lake City — a major tech hub and one of the country’s top-growth cities, “that’s just on a tear.”
“It doesn’t always work,” he said of finding deals on the road. “But it’s the double life.”
“I’m on a text thread with all these guys and girls now and they’re like: ‘Feed us the next deal; what are you doing? How much can we have?’”
Tedder also has the benefit of a cross-industry reputation. He can cinch meetings with the highest echelons of global investment.
He had a sit-down with BlackRock slotted for after the show. He’d linked up with the firm’s real estate team by way of Rick Rieder, its head of fixed income, a few weeks prior.
Even when Tedder puts on his metaphorical investment hat, he typically keeps to his OneRepublic style, refined over years at the band’s front: band tee, cargo pants and shades.
In his primary world — music production — that’s fairly buttoned up.
“Literally, I could probably show up without a shirt, pajamas, no shoes, like drinking a smoothie, smoking a joint, if I wanted,” he said. (“I’m actually describing one specific person who’s a very successful producer,” he added. He did not name a name, but inquiring minds can Google.)
Tedder, for all his stage confidence, does get imposter syndrome in the conference room: “I feel like they’re gonna haul me out of there.”
But that’s just the mistimed stage fright. He said his first meeting with BlackRock was a win: They were impressed with his portfolio and happy to get in on the debt or equity side.
On the day of the PwC show, Tedder and his team were mulling over two New York City deals — one retail, one office. He declined to share details but said they would likely lock down one before he headed to Madrid for a summer-long European tour.
Braff, who also billed himself as Tedder’s “informal money manager,” confirmed a few days later that conversations remained in early stages.
Tedder, through the holding company Patriot Real Estate, and another collaborator, mortgage broker Keith Kantrowitz, did sell off 1295 Madison Avenue, a retail condo on the Upper East Side, for $13 million, a few days later. It’s unclear if the transactions were related. Tedder said he only planned to buy one building in the city.
“Remember those walls I built?”
“Halo Tower,” his biggest commercial undertaking to date, does add a big notch to Tedder’s belt — experience-wise.
The Las Vegas office building, which he and team Moonwater Capital — a local shop run by the father-son team Ofir and Don Hagay — broke ground in June. The duo expects it to be the largest single-standing office tower in the Greater Metropolitan Area: eight stories, 220,000 square feet. Most office in the area is commercial sprawl, corporate parks.
For Tedder, who until now has exclusively invested in small, surefire deals, it’s a big swing: a $130 million project. The team expects to be ready to start construction at the end of August and deliver in two years.
The bet, primarily, is that Las Vegas’ population boom keeps rippling. The Hagays said companies and residents are coming in, specifically Californians fleeing high taxes. “Without getting into politics, thank you Gavin,” Don Hagay said.
“Halo,” named after the Beyoncé hit, to Tedder’s admitted cringe (it took a few tries for his team to wear him down), is “well outside the bounds of my risk aperture.”
“I will only take outsized risk if the outsized reward is dramatically past the outsized risk,” he said over Zoom. “That’s what this building is.”
Money matters to Tedder. Not in an accumulation-of-wealth way, but in a safety-net sense.
The musician grew up lower middle class in Colorado Springs. He has the typical tale of triumph in Los Angeles: moved to the city on credit cards and about $85,000 in college debt (he adjusted for inflation on the Zoom call) and hit it huge to global success.
As OneRepublic was cementing itself on the Billboard Top 100, he remembers stories of music managers running away with their clients’ earnings polluting the ether.
Lou Pearlman, who managed *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, earned a 25-year federal prison sentence for running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.
“That terrified me,” Tedder said.
About that time, he had dinner at a music manager’s home — “a crazy house near the Beverly Hills Hotel” — who tossed out a warning that grew to become the underpinning of Tedder’s financial plan.
“He’s like: You get a record deal, you make money in music — everyone will come after you; it’ll vanish quicker than you know,” the front man remembers.
The advice: “He said — ‘Just be smart and read up on it and put your money into real estate. Don’t pour it back into music; put it into real estate.’”
Fortunately, Tedder has the love bug for both the sex appeal of acquisitions and the much-less-hot minutiae of long-term strategy.
He does his own analyses, like finding the top 10 growth markets for the coming five years and cross-tabulating with the highest population increase and year-over-year income increases.
He taps Claude to comb through listings each day and is training the scary-strong AI assistant to function as a first-tier underwriter on deals. He also works with the human Keith Kantrowitz of the New York firm Power Express Mortgage Bankers. Kantrowitz, whose MRK Properties is on New York City deeds along with Tedder’s firm, says the musician can look at any listing and run it at “any cap, any LTV, any metric” in his head and “is never wrong.”
“I wouldn’t be as deep as I am without him — period,” Kantrowitz said of how far he’s gone down the real estate rabbit hole.
Tedder also likes the tried-and-true Crexi or LoopNet, which he browses while he’s jet-setting from one tour stop to the next. If he’s heading into a town, he knows where cap rates are at, what asset classes are performing over others, where there’s more occupancy to be had before touchdown.
“I have a pulse for kind of every major city in America,” he said.
Tedder also favors the visual tells: “I’m looking at cranes.”
In New York, Tedder does see 168 Canal Street as a contrarian investment: He believes many are leaving the market, so he’s stepping in. At Canal, other would-be buyers seemed to focus on Citibank, the building’s ground-floor tenant, being toward the end of its lease. But Tedder’s team noted the bank’s above-average deposits and gambled that it would renew.
There’s other empirical evidence for the status quo. Dan Marks, principal of brokerage TerraCRG, said some sellers have grumbled about the state of city politics.
“I think it’s really about what politics can actually pass and what kind of impact we’re going to see on the market,” Marks said.
That is, not much has happened yet that would impact office, specifically — and actually office leasing is back tracking 2018 levels. Mamdani has backed, and the New York State Legislature passed, a tax on pieds-à-terre in New York City, the sort of real estate the wealthy often own. But that’s unlikely to scare investors into dropping assets or leaving the city.
The musician’s goal over the next year is expansion. His favored asset class is industrial. His market right now: New York.
“I don’t have any delusions of grandeur about being the next SL Green or [Steve] Witkoff,” he said. “I don’t want to be in The Real Dealevery week.”
“My ambition was to provide a safe place for me to invest money to protect my family and friends,” he added. “Pull it out of music and put it into real estate.”
Tedder sold the majority of his catalog — recorded music and publishing rights — to KKR in January 2021, a few months before he went public with his real estate venture in Rolling Stone.
In harmony
The aim comes from disgust with a lack of the financial stability for artists. The chance of achieving security has gotten lower and lower since he started making music. Over the course of three interviews, this was the topic he was most passionate about, even more than real estate itself.
The advent of streaming services, such as Spotify, means musicians make tiny fractions of a cent for each digital play. There are more writers than ever before on most hits, so even if you’re on a hit song or album, you’re splitting royalties with five other contributors.
Radio still pays, Tedder said. But many songs don’t make it to the airwaves.
Among his longtime friends and collaborators, interest has grown in building a backstop so as not to get pulled under by the industry. Tedder wants to give them an offramp from the relentless album cycle: musician writes, records, releases, tours and starts it all again.
It’s an exhausting routine that Tedder excels at. He credits a combination of running, water and the superhuman jolt of well-directed ADHD.
He offered a few names who have stepped in on deals with him so far: Shaboozey, multi-genre rapper, who swept the 2026 music awards season (investor in a future “Tipsy Tower”?), and Amy Allen, the prolific writer and producer who won the Songwriter of the Year Grammy for a Sabrina Carpenter song (imagine a “Manchild Mansion”). Tedder doesn’t syndicate equity, he said. Rather, he raises from a “family of partners, a bunch of New Yorkers,” who might kick in $2 million on a $10 million deal. He aspires to have more songwriters in that investment compilation.
Tedder, operating off the confidence Shaboozey and Allen will “without question” invest in his other deals, has been expanding his reachouts, setting up meetings with other songwriters.
“Kind of like real estate coffee hour,” he said — two-hour coffees where he explains the soup-to-nuts of investing.
“I’m on a text thread with all these guys and girls now and they’re like: ‘Feed us the next deal; what are you doing? How much can we have?’”
The artists, it seems, want to build.