It was Halloween night in 2021, and something spooky was happening in New York City’s office market.
SL Green Realty learned that Chinese conglomerate HNA Group was putting its 44-story office tower at 245 Park Avenue into bankruptcy. Worse, HNA sought to oust SL Green as property manager, blaming it for failing to fill space vacated by the building’s former anchor tenant, Major League Baseball.
Having invested $148 million in the Midtown property, SL Green was willing to do whatever it took to get it out of bankruptcy and into its portfolio. The REIT’s top brass, CEO Marc Holliday and President Andrew Mathias, turned to Harrison Sitomer, a former college intern who was quickly ascending at the firm after a leadership shakeup in its investment division.
Sitomer, now 33, took the lead on negotiating with HNA and the building’s lenders, a process he said led to many sleepless nights.
“I’d have conversations internally where you’d walk away from them and wonder, ‘Man, I don’t know if I’m gonna pull this off. I don’t know if I can do what’s being asked of me,’” he said.
After nearly a year of back-and-forth, including dueling accusations between SL Green and HNA that at times played out in the press, SL Green walked away with both the 1.8 million-square-foot building and a $185 million arbitration award. The firm is now upgrading the property, which Sitomer called SL Green’s “next major development project” after its splashy new office towers One Vanderbilt and One Madison.
“Great opportunities come out of these types of long, drawn-out processes,” said Sitomer, who was named SL Green’s chief investment officer in December 2021, weeks after the bankruptcy filing at 245 Park. “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”
Some of SL Green’s biggest deals in the past year, including its takeover of 245 Park Avenue and its acquisition of 450 Park Avenue in June, were shepherded by Sitomer — a native New Yorker who prefers yellow cabs to Ubers and claims to have never downloaded Instagram, but is now the youngest person calling the shots at the city’s largest office landlord.
As the office market has turned since 2020, SL Green has been focused on paying down its debt and hedging against rising interest rates as much as expanding its portfolio. But when Darcy Stacom, CBRE’s top investment sales broker, presented the opportunity to pick up the 33-story tower at 450 Park Avenue from Oxford Properties and Crown Acquisitions, Sitomer said it was “an immediate full-court press” to get the deal done.
“We knew from our experience… that this is an area tenants wanted to be,” he said.
Sitomer embarked on a global tour, meeting with potential partners and investors to see who might be interested in teaming up with SL Green to buy the office building. Five months later, the REIT joined investors from Israel and South Korea, including Samsung, to purchase the building for $445 million.
“He’s direct. He tells you what he is looking to accomplish,” Stacom, who advised SL Green on the deal, said of Sitomer. “He gives you the information that you need to execute.”
Despite ongoing headwinds facing the office sector, which haven’t spared SL Green, Sitomer said the firm had faith in its new trophy.
“We buy the right real estate in the best location,” Sitomer said. “Sure, values go up and down in different cycles, but at the end of the day, those are stable, long-term assets that hold values like any other blue chip investment.”
Other notable deals Sitomer has spearheaded include SL Green’s conversion of a $139 million mezzanine loan into an equity stake at RXR Realty’s 5 Times Square in September, the sale of an office condo vacated by WeWork at 609 Fifth Avenue for $100 million to Uri Mermelstein’s Top Rock Holdings in June and bringing in Memorial Sloan Kettering to buy 430,000 square feet of offices at SL Green’s Lipstick Building in September.
“[Sitomer] knows how to deal with people,” Mermelstein said. “He’s one of those people that doesn’t give up and finds a good solution.”
Still, Sitomer’s ascent from intern to C-suite in less than a decade may not have come without a bit of luck.
Just months into the pandemic, co-chief investment officer Isaac Zion, one of Sitomer’s two predecessors in his role, left SL Green after 13 years and is now a principal at Acram Group, a commercial investment firm.
Less than a year later, with SL Green still in selling mode, its other co-CIO, David Schonbraun, departed after nearly 20 years to go head Carlyle Group’s U.S. real estate credit business, and Drew Isaacson, a senior vice president in SL Green’s investment group, jumped to investment sales brokerage Eastdil Secured.
“I love any negative questions because to us it’s just more proving people wrong,” Sitomer said when asked whether he’d lucked into the top job. “I personally live off that. I love to prove people wrong.”