Just when she thought she was out, she got pulled back in.
An inherited real estate firm might not have the pull of Al Pacino’s family business in “The Godfather Part III,” but the daughters of industry titans are finding themselves drawn to the business, often after imagining careers outside of real estate. Some got in after a key internship, while others seemingly changed their minds about the kind of roles they saw for themselves at their firms the longer they worked side by side with a parent. Still others intuited that there might be more ladder to climb than there had been for their mothers or aunts and settled — if not at the top — at the top of a department.
For a long time, succession in real estate remained the purview of male relatives, but as control of city skylines hands off to the next in line, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that the next in line will be a son.
Of course not every influential builder has daughters, and each dynasty takes a different tack on succession, a matter typically discussed only behind closed doors (except when these conversations spill out into the courts). Nor is every daughter who has ascended the org chart in line for the top role someday.
The Real Deal surveyed real estate’s daughters to see where they are settling within some of the most well-known family firms in New York and South Florida, tracking what they do, how and why they joined their business and what blood ties mean to them at the office.
CHANGE OF HEART
Danielle Naftali
There was little talk of real estate at the dinner table when Danielle Naftali was growing up in Bergen County, New Jersey.
“At home we did not spend that much time talking about real estate,” Naftali said. “My dad really took the time when he was home to focus on family. I would go and see the sites and get to see what he was doing, but I wasn’t fully immersed in it growing up.”
Naftali was studying to be a therapist at Syracuse University when a summer internship changed the course of her career. She was working for the leasing team at a different developer’s rental building on West 57th Street and West End Avenue — a job she found with the help of her dad, Miki — and started sprucing up the apartments to boost sales.
“The apartments looked crappy,” she said. “They weren’t staged, and I started to make recommendations. I was like ‘why don’t we paint the walls, why don’t we stage the units.’ All of a sudden we started to get more money.”
She started enjoying the work.
When she approached her dad the next summer about working at Naftali Group, he offered her an entry-level job as a receptionist.
“He said ‘You’re not going to come in here as a manager. You’re going to work your way towards every single position at the company. It made me understand every job at the company, and that every job is hard and you have to work for every single position. I think it was the best thing he did for me.”
DANIELLE NAFTALI ON NAFTALI GROUP'S MIKI NAFTALI, HER FATHER
“He said, ‘You’re not going to come in here as a manager. You’re going to work your way towards every single position at the company,’” Naftali said. “It made me understand every job at the company, and that every job is hard and you have to work for every single position. I think it was the best thing he did for me.”
Her first full-time job was as an on-site administrator at Stribling. After that, Naftali returned to her dad’s company 10 years ago as a marketing assistant. She later took night classes at NYU to earn her business degree. Three years ago, she was promoted to executive vice president, overseeing a team of 12 people as the head of Naftali’s marketing, sales and design.
“I’ve really worked through being the assistant of marketing, then I became the manager and director and now the executive,” Naftali said. “It’s taken me time and now I have a great team under me, and we have a lot more work.”
— Elizabeth Cryan
Jackie Soffer
As a kid, Jackie Soffer saw firsthand what it was like to be a developer in Miami and she wasn’t interested in it.
“There was a lot of fanfare around what my father was doing. I didn’t really like that kids were attracted to that. I never wanted to define myself by that,” she said in an interview with TRD in 2017. “I kind of knew pretty early on the difference between real people and superficiality, and I really shy away from that superficiality.”
She studied communication at the University of Colorado and was a ski teacher when her father, developer Donald Soffer, had her return to Miami to work in the family business.
“He didn’t make it obligatory for all my siblings, but for whatever reason he did it to me,” Soffer said. “I remember thinking to myself, he’s 50, I should go back to Miami and learn from him, and I need to spend time with my dad because he is so old that God knows how much longer I will have with him.”
Soffer said her plan was to work with her dad, now in his early 90s, for two years and then she would return to Colorado. That didn’t happen.
Soffer is chair and CEO of Turnberry Associates, the development firm her father founded and led, which created the city of Aventura. She’s also married to developer Craig Robins, who also comes from a dynastic real estate family.
Jackie worked alongside her brother, Jeffrey Soffer, for years as co-CEOs but they went their separate ways in 2019. Jackie kept Turnberry Associates, while Jeffrey started a new firm, Fontainebleau Development, and they divided some of their assets.
Other members of the Soffer family are also in real estate, but Jackie will likely not push her children into the same path.
“My kids should go out and look at what the world has to offer and what they have to offer the world and figure out what they want to do,” she said. “I think the worst thing you can do is give your kids a sense of entitlement. They have been given the gift of an education, and that is their opportunity.”
— Katherine Kallergis
DEPARTMENT HEAD
Leslie Dezer Salmon
Michael Dezer built a business buying mid-rise apartments and former factory buildings in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood as it cleaned up in the 1970’s before heading south in 1985 to buy up beachfront property in Sunny Isles Beach.
While son Gil Dezer is now president of Dezer Development (in between driving fancy cars and partying on megayachts in Florida and elsewhere on the luxury circuit), Dezer’s daughter and Gil’s sister, Leslie Dezer Salmon, is in charge of the New York City business.
That puts her in charge of holdings that include 1.3 million square feet of space across more than 20 buildings, almost all commercial, in Chelsea, according to Dezer’s website.
— Cara Eisenpress
Helena Durst
The executive team at the Durst Organization is made up exclusively of family members.
Chair Douglas Durst’s daughter Helena joined her family’s firm in 2001, focusing on leasing and the New York Water Taxi, which has since been sold to New York Cruise Lines. She serves as a principal of the company, overseeing the firm’s residential portfolio, including leasing at 57 WEST, EŌS (at 100 West 31st Street), 10 Halletts Point and the restoration of 11 landmarked buildings on Front Street.
Douglas Durst’s cousin Jonathan is president of the company. Kristopher Durst, Jonathan’s brother, serves as chief information officer. Douglas’ son Alexander serves as chief development officer. Their sister, and the oldest sibling, Anita, runs the art nonprofit Chashama.
Douglas’ sister Wendy serves on the board of the Durst Family Foundation. Robert Durst, who died while serving a life sentence on murder charges, stopped working at the firm in the 90s when Douglas was selected to take over the business. Their youngest brother, Thomas, is not involved with the company.
— Kathryn Brenzel
Amanda Gluck
In 2015, the daughter of Larry Gluck joined the firm he started with Steve Witkoff 30 years earlier. Then two real estate attorneys, Gluck and Witkoff founded Stellar Management — Stellar a portmanteau of their first names — before parting ways about a decade later. Witkoff left to focus on office properties and Gluck kept Stellar and the multifamily business.
Stellar went on to become one of the city’s biggest landlords with a portfolio that includes more than 12,000 apartments across 100 multifamily buildings and 2 million square feet of offices in New York City and Miami, plus 1 million square feet under development.
Gluck died in June after being diagnosed with ALS in 2013. The company indicated that his wife, Sandra Gluck, and oldest daughter Amanda Gluck, would remain “at the core of Stellar Management’s leadership team” alongside the executive team, which includes managing partners Adam Roman, Matthew Lembo and Ryan Jackson.
Where is Amanda in that core? She has a VP title and a marketing and public relations role at the firm after training in marketing at a hotel management company, Think Hotel, and at Alison Brod Marketing and Communications. Her two sisters, Heather and Dana, are not involved with Stellar.
— Kathryn Brenzel
Valerie Peltier
Valerie Peltier is the oldest child of Tishman Speyer founder Jerry Speyer. While her brother Rob runs the family business, the low-profile Peltier has worked in the firms’ acquisitions and development group since 1995. Peltier, now managing director, led the development of the $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium, according to her company biography. The Harvard and Columbia Law School grad also served as chairman of the grantmaking nonprofit New York Community Trust for a decade before stepping down Jan. 1.
— Elizabeth Cryan
Jane Gural-Senders and AnnyRose Pahl
After her brother Jeffrey won the right to acquire the Flatiron Building last year for $161 million in a suspenseful auction, Jane Gural-Senders wrapped him in a big hug. He helms the company founded by their father Aaron, who died in 2009.
Gural-Senders serves as executive director and principal, overseeing asset management of 230 Fifth Avenue and the Flatiron Building, where GFP has long been the majority owner. She joined the firm 43 years ago, when it was known as Newmark & Company, according to the firm’s website. She’s not the only woman to join the family business. Jane’s daughter AnnyRose Pahl serves as the firm’s general counsel. Neith Stone, Jeffrey’s granddaughter, also works at GFP as an asset management and leasing associate.
Although she seldom gives interviews, Gural-Senders seems to have a sense of humor. When asked what the family planned to do first with the Flatiron Building, Gural-Senders told New York magazine: “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”
— Elizabeth Cryan
Jessica (Levine) Sherman
Before joining her family’s firm, Jessica Sherman interned at Amazon in their fulfillment department in Seattle and was a fellow at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
She started at Douglaston Development, run by her father Jeffrey Levine, in 2016 as a project manager focused on affordable housing. She is now senior vice president of affordable housing at the company. In her roles there, she has overseen the development of 2,600 units of affordable housing. In 2021, she founded a separate development company, One Bar Development, which has so far teamed up with Douglaston and a couple other developers on a handful of projects. Her brother, Benjamin Levine, is executive vice president of finance and acquisitions at Douglaston.
— Kathryn Brenzel
HAND IN HAND
Caroline (Born) Gleser
When first asked about succession in real estate, Caroline Gleser posited that sons of real estate scions tend to have a top-down approach.
“Sons step in and think they know everything,” she said.
Whereas daughters, she said, “pick up what needs to be done, rather than trying to chart the next 50 years of the company on day one.”
“You integrate, rather than imposing a will from the outside,” she added.
This stereotypical portrait of an alpha heir hasn’t been a reality for Gleser, daughter of Richard Born of BD Hotels. The partnership flows because the two have a collaborative relationship, which has allowed her to comfortably spend time with him. More time, she acknowledges, than with her own husband.
Gleser is the oldest of Born’s three children. She has a sister who is a stay-at-home mom and a brother who works in the film industry. (She does not think the dynamic would be different between her brother and father, if the former decided to join the business.)
BD Hotels made its name proving that New York City boutique hotels outside of Midtown could be trendy. It owns 24 in New York City, including the Mercer and the Chelsea, though it sold off the West Village’s Jane in late 2022.
Gleser did not always plan to join BD Hotels, which her father launched in 1986 with Ira Drukier, nor did she feel pressure to do so.
“My father never said ‘you are coming to work for me,’” she said.
Still, she attended Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, thinking she might eventually end up at the company. When she graduated in 2006, she toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer but did not relish the idea of returning to school, and after a number of conversations with attorneys decided against that path.
Gleser did not work at another real estate company before joining the family business, though she now wishes she had gone somewhere institutional first to have business best practices ingrained in her.
She now serves as a junior partner alongside her father and Drukier. She said there are no plans for other family members to join the company, though they are always welcome. Drukier’s daughter, Jennifer Birnbaum, worked for the company but is no longer involved on a day to day basis. His wife Gale also used to work for the company, in that time managing the Greystone Hotel, which BD Hotels sold in 2007.
In New York, she and the company are largely focused on maintaining existing assets. The firm has halted new projects in the city after officials passed a special permit requirement for all new hotel development.
“It is incredibly difficult to build a new project in New York,” she said. “We’re maintaining inventory.”
Gleser is working on the Nora Hotel, a 201-key boutique hotel that is part of a 2-million-square-foot project in West Palm Beach. Construction on the project is expected to begin this fall.
— Kathryn Brenzel
Christina Pappas
Christina Pappas, president of South Florida brokerage the Keyes Company, has been training to work in the family business since she was a kid. Pappas and her four siblings would go in with her dad, CEO Mike Pappas, on Saturdays.
“I would be the realtor and my sister would be the mom with two kids. I would show them [pretend homes]. We would type up the contract on the typewriter. I would sell the house,” she said. “It’s pretty much the verbage I have known my whole life.”
Christina worked at Keyes, now the largest independent brokerage in Florida, during summers throughout middle and high school. After studying hospitality at Cornell University, she moved to Los Angeles and was employed at Morgans Hotel Group when her grandfather died suddenly in July 2011. She moved back home.
“I really regretted not ever working with him. I didn’t want to miss any more time working with my family. I left L.A., bought a house, and had my real estate license by October of that year,” Pappas said.
She joined Keyes as a real estate agent, working under a mentor in a branch office.
“The best thing my father did was really leave me alone for a while to figure out the business,” she said. He also helped her find women leaders to advise her.
Six years later, she was promoted to manager of the Brickell office. In 2020, she became vice president and was working alongside her dad. Last year, she was promoted to president, taking over the day-to-day operations of the business. The brokerage has more than 3,000 agents across 50 offices in Florida.
As one of few women in a leadership role and the daughter of the CEO, she said she has always made sure she is overly prepared in meetings.
“Until I was able to prove it, there was a little bit of the question of, ‘did I earn my position or was I given it?’”
She also refers to her father as Mike at work, dad at home.
“For me to be able to stand on my own, I don’t need [to hear] ‘go ask your daddy for help.’”
Pappas is the only one of her siblings to work for Keyes. Her husband, Alberto Carillo, is a district sales manager at the firm. She expects her father will never fully retire, much like her grandfather. She hopes the next generation of Pappases will join Keyes when they’re older — if that’s what they want.
Pappas and her dad will argue in front of other company leaders “so they know it’s OK to fight.”
“You really need conflict in order to air out everything,” Christina said. “We joke that we are really good at conflict.”
Her biggest challenge is turning off work during family dinners or vacations. If she and her father won’t stop talking about work, the rest of their family will make them sit next to each other so they’re not talking across the table.
“One of the best things about my life is I work with family and one of the worst things is I work with family,” she said. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”
— Katherine Kallergis
Saba Vahdat
Saba Vahdat didn’t have a job description when she joined her father’s firm, Elmo Realty Co., nine years ago. She had just finished graduate school and found herself “just sitting in an office and staring at the walls” for most of the day.
That quickly changed when the firm moved office spaces — from the 51st to the 53rd floor of the Empire State Building — and her father, Moujan Vahdat, put her in charge of the renovation.
“My dad approached me and said, ‘You need something to do. Do you want to project manage and be the general contractor for the office space?’” Vahdat said. “I was so excited. I finally had something to do. I renovated this space and that was the first time that I had any introduction to renovation or construction.”
Vahdat, now 33, learned on the job, arriving at 5:30 a.m. to push dumpster containers onto the freight elevator, check in on subcontractors and vendors and work with architects to design the space. She fell in love with construction, even though the firm had previously been focused on buying and selling properties.
“I grew up in a wonderful community among many people who are in the real estate business — but many men who are in the real estate business. I didn’t see many women, either wives or daughters, who stepped up and wanted to take the family business to the next level.”
SABA VAHDAT, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT ELMO REALTY CO.
After that, she oversaw the renovation of 170 East 123rd Street, which opened as a 135-bed men’s mental health shelter in March. She’s led four developments in the past four years and is now the executive vice president of the firm.
It’s a life she didn’t envision growing up in Long Island’s Great Neck.
“I grew up in a wonderful community among many people who are in the real estate business — but many men who are in the real estate business,” Vahdat said. “I didn’t see many women, either wives or daughters, who stepped up and wanted to take the family business to the next level.”
— Elizabeth Cryan
Katja Goldman Sonnenfeldt and Dorian Goldman Israelow
Squabbling between Lloyd Goldman and his two older sisters was getting in the way of business, he told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. So their company, BLDG Management, created an outside board of advisers in 2002 to work alongside Goldman and his sisters, Katja Goldman Sonnenfeldt and Dorian Goldman Israelow, overseeing the decision-making process as the company redeveloped the World Trade Center and continued to expand the real estate empire they inherited from their father in 1995. The sisters keep low business profiles but are active philanthropists, supporting several arts and Jewish organizations. And the siblings seem to agree on passing the baton to the next generation.
“We agreed that when someone graduates college, we wouldn’t hire them for five years,” Goldman told the Journal. “They should seek proficiency in their skill set or come here with a professional degree.”
— Elizabeth Cryan
AT THE TOP
Veronica Cervera Goeseke, Alicia Cervera Lamadrid
Unlike most of their peers who joined the family business alongside their dads, Veronica Cervera Goeseke and Alicia Cervera Lamadrid work for their mother.
Alicia Cervera Sr., the 94-year-old chairman of Cervera Real Estate, is still involved in the brokerage, alongside her daughters and grandchildren. Having Goeseke and Lamadrid follow their mother was a request that came from their late father, Javier Cervera Sr.
He told Goeseke to work with her mother for six months.
“I never said no to my father,” she said.
Lamadrid, who studied psychology in college, has a similar story, though she said personal choices pushed her to get into real estate.
“My dad was a man of very few rules or requests, but we did not say no to him,” Lamadrid said. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to starve to death so you need to get your real estate license.’”
Growing up, they worked with their mom informally, beginning when Cervera Sr. entered the workforce when her daughters were teenagers, though she had her real estate license years earlier.
“She kind of treated us as adults. As she did different things in life, we sort of went with her,” Goeseke said.
Now, Goeseke, the older sister, is CEO of Miami-based Cervera Real Estate, a brokerage that handles resale business and new development sales. Lamadrid is managing partner. Goeseke’s daughter, Alejandra, said she wouldn’t work for the company if the Cerveras didn’t set up “real family planning,” Goeseke said.
Goeseke said they dreaded the process but that everyone benefited from it.
“There’s an element of respect that goes into a professional company. When it’s a family, that gets fudged all the time,” Lamadrid said. Having a moderator facilitate the succession planning helped.
Working with family and juggling different personalities is challenging, they said. Birth order has played a role in the dynamic, as well as their parents’ lessons. “My father would accept no arguments within a family that lasted beyond a day or two,” Goeseke said.
As the oldest sibling, “I always say no one invites me for a martini, but everybody calls me on the way to the hospital,” Goeseke said.
When it comes to the next generation, Lamadrid said giving them the option is key.
“It’s important that the generations can all stand on their own two feet, that they feel like they have choices, and that the family business is an option, but not the only option, and that life has challenges,” Lamadrid said. “Wherever you go, and if you choose to work in a family business, there’s lots of challenges. But if it’s a choice, then it’s OK, right?”
— Katherine Kallergis
Jane Goldman
With Jane at the helm of the multibillion-dollar estate father Sol Goldman acquired, she and two sisters, Amy Goldman Fowler and Diane Goldman Kemper, and their brother Allan were famously quiet for decades, as long-term ground lease tenants paid rent on their hundreds of holdings.
But following Allan’s death, a succession struggle has pitted family members against each other, bringing their histories, relationships and job titles to light in court documents. Read more on the Goldmans here.
Nicole Kushner Meyer
Before joining her family’s firm in 2015, Nicole Kushner Meyer was in fashion at Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation. Her studies hinted that she might go into real estate someday: Kushner Meyer got her bachelor’s degree in urban design and architecture and then her masters in urban planning from New York University.
Kushner Meyer is the third-oldest child out of four. Her older brother, Jared, started working at the family firm in 2008 but left in 2017 to join the administration of his father-in-law, Donald Trump. He later launched an investment firm in Miami.
Her brother’s departure appears to have created space for her to rise up the ranks, and Kushner Meyer became president in 2021.
“We were living in unprecedented times and I realized I would need to broaden my responsibility and scope,” she said of the transition.
She said her passion for real estate was encouraged at a young age, and that her parents pushed her and her siblings to step outside their comfort zones but also “to pursue our passions responsibly.”
She helps oversee a portfolio of more than 21,000 apartments across 14 states, and is working on the development of 12,500 residential units in New Jersey and Florida, including One Journal Square in Jersey City.
Kushner Meyer’s younger brother Joshua runs a New York investment firm, Thrive Capital, while her older sister Dara doesn’t appear to be involved in real estate.
Charles Kushner, their father, has largely remained behind the scenes though he continues to have influence as the company’s chair; Laurent Morali is CEO.
— Kathryn Brenzel
Cheryl McKissack Daniel
Construction firm McKissack & McKissack can trace its history back two centuries, when Moses McKissack, a formerly enslaved person, built a business making and selling bricks. His grandsons would go on to create a construction business in 1905, a Nashville-based outfit dubbed McKissack & McKissack.
Moses’ great-great-granddaughter Cheryl McKissack Daniel is CEO of McKissack & McKissack in New York. She took over the business in 1991 from her mother, who had run it out of Nashville since the 1980s after her husband suffered a stroke and stepped down.
Cheryl’s twin sister, Deryl, opened her own McKissack & McKissack in Washington, D.C., in 1990. Both women worked at other firms, including Turner Construction, before launching their own outfits. Cheryl’s firm has worked on several major transit, academic, hospital and aviation projects across the tri-state area, including the Oculus at the World Trade Center transit hub and Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station.
— Kathryn Brenzel
Jessica Goldman Srebnick
Jessica Goldman Srebnick, then an associate fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, had decided to go to business school when she had “one of those conversations that you remember for your entire life” with her mother, Janet Goldman.
“She told me that I should go to the Tony Goldman School of Business. There’s no one who would have my interests at heart more than my dad, and that I should take the opportunity to learn from him,” Goldman Srebnick, now co-chair of Goldman Properties, said. She gave her father a one-year contract. This was 1997.
“I didn’t want to screw up [our] relationship, because we had an amazing father-daughter relationship,” Goldman Srebnick said.
Her dad, company founder Tony Goldman (no relation to the other New York City Goldmans), had her work in every division before sending her to Miami to open what is now called the Tony South Beach. But her education technically began years earlier, working as a cashier or bartender in their restaurant, or at other jobs that popped up.
Tony Goldman became known for revitalizing New York’s Soho, the Art Deco district in South Beach and Miami’s Wynwood, where Goldman Properties is now based. Its portfolio there includes Wynwood Walls and the Wynwood Garage.
Goldman Srebnick’s father named her CEO a few days before he passed away of heart failure at age 68, four years after receiving a double lung transplant. She had been there 15 years. She took on the new role while also dealing with the loss of one of her “biggest cheerleaders,” she said.
“You think you’re prepared, you’re not prepared. Nothing can prepare you for the loss of a parent, a best friend, a mentor,” Srebnick said.
After she took over, Goldman Srebnick said she felt pressure to prove herself to people outside of the company that she was “not just Tony’s daughter” or a wallflower but someone with her own style and work ethic. She likes to lead with a hand and not a hammer.
Instead of forcing her to operate exactly like he did, Goldman pushed her to figure out how to handle a situation on her own terms.
“When we would work together, I would say, ‘Dad, what do I do?’ And he would say, ‘I don’t know. I’m on a desert island, and you can’t talk to me, so figure it out.’ And it used to infuriate me,” she said.
But, “he gave me every ounce of confidence that I could do anything, that I could stand in a room, whether it was filled with men or filled with whoever the most successful people in the world, that I belong there,” she added.
After nine years, Goldman Srebnick handed the CEO title to her husband Scott Srebnick in 2021 after navigating the pandemic. She has since focused on the business’s arts-related work, curating the Wynwood Walls and leading the Goldman Global Arts initiative, which has included a collaboration with the NFL. Her husband leads the growing Goldman Properties business.
With the title of co-chair, she works alongside her mother, founder and chairwoman emeritus, and her brother, Joey Goldman, who is co-chair.
As when she worked for her father, she and her husband have boundaries when they talk about business and when they don’t, she said.
“The benefit was [Tony Goldman] wasn’t just my boss. It was grandpa, right? So he understood how I needed to balance being a mother and being a business person. And he was very loving and patient,” she said. “It’s very different to be a woman in business than it is to be a man in business. I was really lucky that my dad treated me, and therefore others treated me, in a sense without gender.”
— Katherine Kallergis
Samantha Rudin Earls
Originally, Rudin Earls doubted she’d join the family business. But along with her brother Michael, she became co-CEO of Rudin Management last year, taking over for their father Bill and cousin Eric. Rudin Earls oversees the residential portfolio. See The Closing interview for more on Rudin Earls.
Lisa Silverstein
In 2013, Roger and Lisa Silverstein told the Wall Street Journal that they were not interested in taking over their father’s development firm. The company had brought in Related Companies veteran Marty Burger to take the helm as CEO.
“I feel that a CEO is really in the role of giving 100 percent of themselves,” Lisa Silverstein told the newspaper at the time. “There was no way that I would feel comfortable.”
At some point over the last decade, she got comfortable. Last year, Larry Silverstein announced that Lisa would take over for Burger as CEO.
She is the youngest of the Silverstein children. Roger had served as executive vice president, in overseeing leasing and managing the firm’s commercial properties. In his new book, “The Rising: The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center,” Larry Silverstein notes that Roger is “semi-retired” but is still involved in “big decisions.” His oldest, Sharon, worked for the family firm for a few years, got her MBA from Harvard Business School and now lives on the West Coast. She is a full-time mother. Lisa’s husband, Tal Kerret, serves as the firm’s president.
“At this point, I have handed the baton to Lisa and she is the one really making all the day-to-day decisions,” he wrote. “Sure, she is assisted by her gifted husband, Tal, the company president, and a terrific team of executives and employees. But it is my daughter Lisa whom I have appointed to lead the company into the future.”
—Kathryn Brenzel