South Florida’s Jills Zeder Group is the top residential team in the country by such a wide margin that the second-place team brings in only half their dollar volume.
Katherine Kallergis’ reporting on the three principals — Jill Eber, Jill Hertzberg and Judy Zeder — found no dispute of their dominance. But hanging onto the top is a different challenge.
The group has one massive advantage: Political and economic realities have sent a flow of high-net-worth buyers, especially billionaire CEOs, from California, Illinois and New York, to their territory.
But beyond the good luck (for them), they display a mastery of empire preservation evident in how they’ve amassed new regions — “no wealthy waterfront market in Miami-Dade now lacks a Jills Zeder Group presence,” Kallergis writes — in solidifying the infrastructure of a sprawling team, in planning for succession and in making disloyalty expensive.
In the flurry of success, it’s easy to forget that for them and plenty others, a real estate career is the fallback option when another pursuit fails or, for women, after kids.
It’s a similar tune for a pop star whose trail from music to real estate came from a fear of getting old and irrelevant. Singer-songwriter Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic was looking for financial security but ended up catching the real estate investment bug. He now gets more stage fright for investor meetups to help build his portfolio (currently worth $1 billion, he said) than before concerts.
Meanwhile, six months into Zohran Mamdani’s term as New York City mayor, he delivered a rent freeze, which was a major campaign promise. Lilah Burke introduces the constellation of tenant groups who espoused the freeze and thus gained power in the administration, while Erik Engquist sorts out the capitalist and socialist bullet points in the mayor’s recently released housing plan.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Rich Bockmann burrows beneath the tower at 1 Penn Plaza. He’s not plumbing the sewers, but he might as well be for all the muck he finds in the backstory of Vornado’s ground lease on land owned by the Korein family. The story evokes gritty old Midtown South, and deploys some great Billy Joel quotes.
Also don’t miss our rundown of a Texas YIMBY backlash, an investigation into a Hamptons developer struggling to finish projects and pay back loans and the winners and losers of the Chicago Bears’ announced move to Indiana.
Enjoy the issue!