Larry Silverstein has replaced his firm’s longtime CEO Marty Burger with his daughter, Lisa Silverstein, who had been the vice chairman.
Silverstein Properties “is sharpening its focus on its core businesses as the company transitions to the next generation,” a spokesman for the New York-based firm told The Wall Street Journal. “As part of that transition, the company is parting ways with Marty Burger.”
His ousting does not come entirely out of the blue; a rumor that he would be replaced by another development firm’s CEO circulated some time ago, but The Real Deal could not confirm it and the move never came to fruition.
“The opportunity to develop and grow the Silverstein platform and to build this great team over the last 14 years has been an honor,” Burger said in a statement. “I’m proud of what we have accomplished.”
The longtime executive added, “I am eager to pursue some exciting new opportunities and look forward to having more to say in the near future.”
Lisa Silverstein, a mother of three who has been working with her father for 28 years, is the youngest of Larry Silverstein’s three children and is married to the firm’s president, Tal Kerret. The couple live in Tribeca and are “personally involved in every building design and every new tech development” at the firm, Forbes wrote in 2022.
The firm told its employees of the leadership change Wednesday, according to the Journal, and quickly updated its website to reflect the new hierarchy.
The firm has more than 400 employees and a real estate portfolio valued at more than $10 billion, according to its website. Larry Silverstein appeared recently on The Real Deal‘s podcast, Deconstruct, but did not hint at his succession plan.
Burger had been with Silverstein since 2010 and its CEO since 2012, sharing the job with Larry Silverstein, the company’s 92-year-old founder and chairman, for a year before taking the reins on his own. Before that he ran Valley Residential for four years and spent nine years as a Related Companies executive. Early in his career — from 1994 to 1997 — he was a vice president at the Blackstone Group.
Burger started as a real estate consultant at Laventhol & Horwath in 1987 after graduating from Wharton.
Silverstein Properties is best known as the primary developer of the World Trade Center site. It signed a long-term lease for the Twin Towers with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey seven weeks before the buildings were destroyed by the 9/11 attacks. The firm built 3, 4, and 7 World Trade Center, and plans to build 2 World Trade Center and 5 World Trade Center.
The company says it owns nearly 16 million square feet of commercial, residential and retail space in 10 office towers in Manhattan, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, two Midtown rental buildings and a 443-unit Orlando hotel. Silverstein has 9 million square feet of development underway, although a $2 billion project it is developing with two partners in Queens is on hold pending reinstatement of an expired property tax break.
This article has been updated with a statement from Marty Burger.
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