These developers build the most homes in NYC

Cherit, Extell top list, but ranking reveals some surprises

Ranking New York City’s Top Residential Developers
From left: Extell Development's Gary Barnett, The Chetrit Group’s Joseph Chetrit, and Domain Companies' Matt Schwartz (Getty, Extell Development, Domain Companies, The Chetrit Group)

UPDATED: August 28 at 2:50 p.m.:

New York City has everything. Everything except enough housing.

But some builders are doing something about that.

Nearly 40,000 units of multifamily housing are under construction in the city’s three most populous boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens — and nearly 20 percent of them are being built by just five developers.

The upper echelons of the list of the city’s top residential developers closely resembles The Real Deal’s recent ranking of developers across all sectors, based on square footage of both residential and commercial projects.

The eponymous firm of Moroccan émigré Joseph Chetrit tops the resi ranking, based on the same three projects — encompassing 2,156 units — that put him at the top of the overall ranking. Likewise, Gary Barnett’s Extell Development was the second-ranked developer overall and No. 2 spot on the resi list with 1,776 units. And Matt Schwartz’s Domain Companies also reprised its role in the No. 3 spot based on the 1,114 units across the same three projects that gave it the bronze in the square-footage ranking. 

But after that, the resi-only ranking diverges from the cross-sector league table. While Teconic Partners and Boston Properties rounded out the top five of the overall ranking based on their commercial projects, it was Heartfelt Builders that ranked No. 4 in the resi ranking with 1,045 units underway, and Lendlease ranking fifth with 834 units.

To rank the city’s top residential developers, The Real Deal analyzed all new building filings submitted to the Department of Buildings between May 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023 for projects in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens with at least five proposed residential units.

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Units under construction are not evenly distributed across the city. Brooklyn has over 45 percent of them, spread across many smaller projects. In that borough, the list of top resi developers looks quite different.

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Lendlease, which ranks No. 6 citywide, is the top resi developer in Kings County, with 834 units under construction in two projects. The Domain Companies’ two Brooklyn projects, with 615 total units, ranks it No. 2, and Apollo Global Management, which is developing a tower at 589 Fulton Street with the Witkoff Group, ranks third in the borough with 592 units on tap.

In Queens, Heartfelt Builders is the No. 1 resi developer with 1,045 across two projects. BLDG Management comes in second with an 825-unit project, and Vornado — which doesn’t even make the top 10 in the citywide resi developer ranking — ranks third based on the 568 units it’s building next to its Rego Center mall.

Correction: An earlier version of this story listed MAG Partners No. 3 in the city based on the number of proposed units listed in the new building permit for its Chelsea project, but the actual number of units in development there is significantly smaller.

For inquiries about how to obtain the underlying data set referenced in this story, email research@therealdeal.com