MRC Provides $173M Construction Loan for MAG Partners’ West Chelsea Rental Project

A new rental tower is now fully set to rise in West Chelsea. 

Madison Realty Capital (MRC) just closed a $173 million construction loan for the development of 241 West 28th Street, Commercial Observer has learned. A joint venture between MaryAnne Gilmartin’s MAG Partners, Atalaya, Safanad and Australian investor Qualitas is developing the 479-unit project.

MRC provided the developers with a three-year financing at a 65 percent loan-to-cost. Jeff Rosen, a managing director at MAG Partners, led the financing on behalf of the sponsorship. Maverick Capital’s Adi Chugh negotiated the debt.

“This, in some ways, is a bet on New York, but it’s also a recognition of the resilience of the industry in the face of the pandemic,” Gilmartin told CO today.  “This project is one I’m particularly proud of, because it took so very much to get here. And while I’ve been involved in financings and closings that have been far more complex — from a real estate point of view — I can tell you that all of the externalities and the dynamics associated with the last six months have made this closing a real accomplishment. We are really appreciative of all the sponsorship, including Madison.”

In 2018, L&L MAG signed a 99-year ground lease for the West Chelsea site, with plans to build a 372,000-square-foot COOKFOX-designed property that included retail space on the ground floor. Now that the L&L MAG partnership has split, it’s MAG Partners who is leading the project and it marks MAG Partners’ first standalone deal.

When completed, 70 percent of 241 West 28th Street’s units will be market-rate and the rest will be designated affordable. The project also benefits from a 35-year tax abatement. With the construction financing now sealed, development will kick off next month, and the building is expected to be delivered in 2022. 

“We’re very excited to have closed this $173 million loan at a relatively low loan-to-cost with such an esteemed sponsorship group,” Zegen said. “This marquee 479-unit multifamily rental building, located within a few blocks of Hudson Yards and other prominent tech tenant expansions on the West Side, will be one of the only new multifamily rental projects built in Manhattan in the next few years. We were pleased to fill a void which would customarily be financed by conventional banks, and provide our flexibility, certainty and conviction.”

The deal is one of the few significant construction loans to close during COVID, and the sponsorship had to navigate the new debt playing field when selecting a lender. 

“One complexity was that the conventional lenders are just not showing up at the dance, they’re all frozen,” Gilmartin said. “The usual suspects for us weren’t available to commit, and didn’t believe they could go the distance with us because the future is so uncertain. So, there was a smaller group of prospective lenders. I love [MRC] because Josh and his team are in our business; not only are they lenders, but there are builders themselves. They know how to underwrite risk, and they understand value creation associated with development. 

“And that’s a rare thing in a lender,” Gilmartin added. “So, partly, it’s their DNA that brought them in and I think their staying power had a lot to do with how they’re hardwired. They were the perfect lending option for us, given the state of the city, the uncertainty, and for them it was all about the sponsorship, because they —like us — believe that this is a moment in time and that New York is going to come out of this.” 

The project is close to some buzzed-about projects, including Vornado’s redevelopment of the landmarked former post office at 421 Eighth Avenue. In August, Facebook inked a 730,000-square-foot deal for the entire office portion.

“West Chelsea was — pre-pandemic — one of the hottest locations in all of New York, and it’s a very difficult place to afford a multifamily building because land prices are extraordinarily high,” Gilmartin said. “If you were just doing a straight-up purchase of the dirt you’d never pencil out on a 70/30 [project]; it just would never make sense.”

Gilmartin said that Edison, which owns the land, did not want to part with its interest in the site, “so, we have here an opportunity to put online a beautiful, mid-block, 22-story asset, and it’s very difficult to imagine that anybody else is going to be able to do what we’re doing,” she said. “We’re building this project in the heart of the tech community and, even through the pandemic, Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon have all doubled down on the city. We think this particular location is really the heart of where much of the city’s growth and prosperity will lie.” 

The deal represents Safanad’s first multifamily project in New York City. 

“This was a really unique opportunity for us to work with great partners and to make an investment in New York City residential but — more importantly — New York City in general,” Andrew Trickett, a partner at Safanad, told CO. “We looked at this project and its location, and this opportunity is a really great long-term bet on New York City. We’ve had a lot of headwinds flying around the marketplace today, but we have an enormous amount of faith in MaryAnne and her team’s ability to execute here.” 

The rental tower isn’t Atalaya’s first foray into the Nomad market. In 2018, the investment fund provided $65 million in preferred equity as part of a $315 million construction financing for Flag Luxury Properties’ Ritz-Carlton hotel at 1185 Broadway. 

For MRC’s part, it has been actively lending and investing through COVID-19. According to sources, the firm has raised more than $1 billion in capital since the beginning of the pandemic. 

MRC’s ability to approach deals as a lender but with an owner’s perspective was an ideal fit for the 28th Street project, Chugh said. 

“There’s an old saying that goes, ‘You cannot learn about roads from a road map. You can only learn about a road by traveling it,” he said. “And I think Josh is a perfect amalgamation of a lender who also is empathetic to the equity owner/ operator side of the business. When I am talking to Josh about a transaction, I’m talking to somebody who has a multi-dimensional understanding of the deal. He understands the deal from a finance perspective, and he understands the deal from a development perspective. He understands what is required for a developer to be successful, and then he creates a platform and a deal that gives them the tools to get there.”

As for what’s next for MAG Partners, Gilmartin has her hands full but is excited for the future. In July, she was appointed interim CEO of Mack-Cali, as reported by CO. 

“One of the really big milestones for me and my team on this project is that I have spun off out of my partnership with David Levinson and Robert Lapidus, which was a two-year success,” Gilmartin said. “I’ve spun off into MAG partners, which I own 100 percent, and this project came with me along with my other projects. So what’s really exciting about this building is that it’s a hallmark of MAG Partners, which is a 100 percent woman owned, ground-up development company. With this talented group of people that I took from Forest City, I created L&L MAG and now have spun out into MAG Partners, and 28th Street represents the first project of many.”

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Big Mack Attack: How MaryAnne Gilmartin Is Working to Turn Around Mack-Cali

There’s nothing like an uprising from investors to oust a company’s chief executive to spice up a global pandemic.

After a proxy battle last year shook up the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation’s board of directors, one of New Jersey’s largest landlords faced another clash in mid-March when an activist investor called for the resignation of CEO Michael DeMarco.

The investors got their wish in July when DeMarco left his post after nearly five years as the pandemic waned on. In his wake, the company named real estate titan MaryAnne Gilmartin, who cut her teeth at Forest City Ratner, to serve as interim CEO for six months. (DeMarco couldn’t be reached for comment.)

“I think it’s an outstanding choice given her background both on the public and private side and her expertise in large, complex developments and working through complex structures,” Thomas Catherwood, an analyst at BTIG who covers Mack-Cali, said. “I think she’s uniquely suited for the task of taking over what is a complex company.”

CBRE’s Mary Ann Tighe said Gilmartin has a “persuasive ability” to get people to get on board with her plans — convincing the legendary Manhattan broker to help out on a Jersey City project, for instance — who has “outperformed” her entire career. Tighe first met Gilmartin when Forest City Ratner was pitching, and eventually won, the chance to build the New York Times Building at 620 Eighth Avenue.

“Nobody thought they were a serious contender for the job,” Tighe said. “Bruce Ratner did a great job, but I can tell you MaryAnne carried the day. All the New York developers were stunned and it was because she had a vision for The New York Times — as did Bruce clearly — and they were able to execute that.”

And it’s not just outsiders pleased with the choice. Ronald Dickerman, founder and president of Madison International Realty, which acquired a 5 percent stake in Mack-Cali last year, also heaped praise on Gilmartin.

“She’s very, very bright, very capable and I think that she will do well,” Dickerman said. “We certainly agree that the company needs to continue its evolution.”

Gilmartin, who is splitting her time with running her own firm, MAG Partners, said she’s “hit the ground running” in her nearly two months at the helm of Mack-Cali in order to bring about the change investors have been clamoring for at “warp speed.”

“I’ve done a couple of big moves in a little bit of time,” Gilmartin said. “This is an interim position, but we’re not going to wait to make strategic changes to move the company forward and to deliver better value to the shareholders.”

Banking on the ‘burbs
So far Gilmartin has quickened the pace of Mack-Cali’s strategy to sell off suburban office holdings to shore up its balance sheet and focus on multifamily and office properties in higher-density waterfront spots like Jersey City.

In July, Mack-Cali sold off its Madison, N.J., office property at 3 Giralda Farms for $7.8 million and in mid-September its Florham Park property at 325 Columbia Turnpike for an undisclosed amount, CoStar Group reported. On Sept. 17, Mack-Cali closed on a $160 million sale of a 10-building office portfolio in Morris County, N.J., to Onyx Equities, Taconic Capital Advisors, Axonic Capital and Machine Investment Group. Gilmartin said Mack-Cali expects to get rid of more in the next quarter.

“It gives us the opportunity to pay down corporate debt and also invest in the waterfront assets of Jersey City,” Gilmartin said.

Gilmartin has also shaken up Mack-Cali’s staff. She brought in new people to fill key roles at the company, including a new head of leasing she can’t announce yet as well as former Forest City Ratner and MAG Partners vets Rob Willis, Adam Greene and Ashley Cotton. And, in August, the company tapped Basis Investment Group CEO Tammy Jones to serve as lead independent director of its board.

The new hires haven’t come without some pain. In early September, Mack-Cali laid off about 20 people on its nearly 300-person staff. Gilmartin couldn’t give the details on the divisions targeted in the cuts but said some were related to the disposition of certain assets, while, for others, Mack-Cali outsourced the roles.

“Obviously, that’s always as a CEO one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, but as a public company, a bloated [general and administrative expense] is never a good thing, particularly in challenging times,” Gilmartin said.

Aside from staffing shakeups, Gilmartin has turned her focus strongly on the 4.5 million-square-foot Harborside office campus on Jersey City’s waterfront. The site has faced plenty of vacancies after the company started a $75 million renovation in 2018.

“I think it’s probably the most underrated piece of commercial real estate in the region,” Gilmartin said. “Repositioning Harborside as a campus on the Jersey City waterfront when we all go back to the office is a major, major priority of mine.”

To help those efforts, Gilmartin tapped CBRE’s Tighe to come across the Hudson River and help build a New Jersey-based team to lease up the property while pitching the property to Manhattan tenants.

“This isn’t one of these cases where you go and say ‘It needs everything,’” Tighe said. “You don’t have that reaction at all. You have the reaction that this is a very under-appreciated asset and MaryAnne has a very clear vision of what to do.”

Tighe will continue to market the property to the traditional tenants that filled it — financial institutions and law firms — but also wants to appeal to tech companies that might be attracted by the vibrant neighborhoods nearby.

“I think what New York City companies and brokers — because you’re always marketing to the brokers — haven’t seen is the evolution of Jersey City itself,” Tighe said. “Now you got this cool residential neighborhood that is all over.”

Plus, the area might save companies significant sums. CBRE marketing materials show tenants could pay nearly 32 percent less than the average rent in Downtown Manhattan and nearly 50 percent less than Midtown renting at Harborside.

Even with all the changes in a short time, there’s still a lot to overcome before Mack-Cali can shake off the past missteps and come out on the other side. The company has millions of square feet of its suburban portfolio to sell off and the pandemic likely cut the costs it could fetch for it.

“It’s probably going to be a little more challenging in the COVID environment,” Gilmartin said about the selloffs. “Everybody’s talking about the suburbs having a second coming. It’s hard for me to know if that’s true, but I can assure you we’re going to market into that story because there are definitely buyers out there who believe that.”

Mack-Cali’s stock price has dropped by nearly 9 percent since January; and, in July, before Gilmartin took the helm, Fitch Ratings downgraded the REIT to a negative outlook of BB-. Fitch cited the company’s “high leverage, weak liquidity coverage, active development program, limited unsecured debt and equity capital access and moderate complexity from joint venture (JV) investments” as reasons for the drop.

BTIG’s Catherwood said that while the company has some amazing land holdings in Jersey City and Weehawken, its huge debt load — it’s carrying a debt to equity ratio of 1.38 — makes it hard to capitalize on it.

“I don’t think they have the time horizon to fully build out their land bank in the company’s current structure,” Catherwood said. “Something is going to need to happen: whether it’s a different type of partnership, whether it’s some sort of recapitalization, whether it’s an outright sale. The problem it faces right now is it’s a company going through growing pains.”

The weight
A lot of Mack-Cali’s debt came from the company’s huge push into the multifamily market nearly a decade ago.

Mack-Cali started in 1969 as Cali Associates when John Cali built his first office property in Cranford, N.J., The New York Times reported. He kept going and developed office buildings all around New Jersey, including the International Financial Tower in Jersey City.

The company went public in 1994, and became Mack-Cali when it merged with fellow New Jersey firm the Mack Company in 1997, The Wall Street Journal reported. Things started to take a turn for the worse when former Mack Company head William Mack left in 1999, and Mitchell Hersh became CEO.

Hersh started a huge push into the multifamily market in 2011, which kicked into high gear in 2012 when Mack-Cali acquired residential developer Roseland Partners for $134.6 million, the Journal reported. Since then, the company has built huge luxury developments like Urby and the Soho Lofts, both in Jersey City.

However, Hersh faced criticism for his brash management style. The company, too, kept underperforming in the early 2010s while the rest of the real estate sector improved. Hersh left in 2015, with Mitchell Rudin taking over as CEO and DeMarco as president. DeMarco was later bumped to CEO and Rudin became a vice chairman. Rudin eventually left for Savills in 2018.

DeMarco and Rudin faced the task of dealing with Mack-Cali’s high vacancy rate throughout its nearly 25 million-square-foot suburban office portfolio while it carried one of the highest levels of debt for any office REIT, the Journal reported.

That high debt level sprang from the company’s controversial push into multifamily, but DeMarco had no other choice but to go all-in on the strategy, Catherwood said.

“The previous management was stuck with a very challenging situation,” Catherwood said. “Really, the only strategy left for them, short of selling the company, was to sell their suburban offices to use that capital to develop more residential assets.”

The company started to aggressively sell off its suburban portfolio to put the money into its waterfront holdings, with it dispossessing $528 million worth of properties in 2017 alone and nearly $400 million in 2018, as Commercial Observer previously reported. It was around this time that Ronald Dickerman saw potential in Mack-Cali, and Madison International bought 4.5 million shares in February 2019.

“It’s a listed property company trading at a large discount to [net asset value] which is executing a transition that, if successful, will leave them with a major concentration of Class A residential and office directly on the Jersey side of the Hudson River across from Hudson Yards, Manhattan West and Brookfield Place,” Dickerman said. “If the company continues executing on the plan, in our view the company will either be much more attractive to REIT shareholders or is likely to sell themselves.”

In DeMarco’s own words, there was no better person to lead the company’s change than himself. In a 2017 interview with NJ.com, DeMarco called himself a “turnaround expert” and a “stone-cold killer.” He had similarly high praise for himself in a 2018 interview with CO.

“I only have one speed; it’s just the way I am,” he said. “If I do something, I do it very well.”

After the battle 
But not everybody was as confident in DeMarco as he was in himself. Investment firm Bow Street, which owns a 4.5 percent stake in Mack-Cali, started a proxy battle in 2019 to install more members on the board after Mack-Cali turned down a $2.4 billion takeover bid that would’ve spun its office portfolio into a separate REIT, The Real Deal reported.

After a very public back-and-forth, Bow Street eventually succeeded and got four members added to Mack-Cali’s board, including Gilmartin. It was then that Gilmartin realized the problems with the company couldn’t be fixed with a simple board shakeup.

“It turned out to be a lot harder to make a difference just because of the way the board was structured,” Gilmartin said. “Once you’re inside, while you’re not under the hood inside the company, you start to appreciate how governance works, the board dynamic; the level of engagement on the part of the board members and all that, to me was, was deeply disappointing and there was lots of room for improvement.”

In March, Bow Street started a push to replace DeMarco, writing in an open letter that, “It is now clear that the rot at Mack-Cali goes far deeper than any of us knew and that more comprehensive action is required to protect shareholders’ investment.”

“Having lost two proxy battles in successive years, I haven’t come across that in any other REIT,” Catherwood said. “To completely overhaul the board, to completely overhaul the corporate governing structure and then the change in the C-suite is really indicative of a sea change at the company.”

Gilmartin took over either for six months or until the company finds a permanent CEO. Mack-Cali will in turn pay MAG Partners a monthly fee of $150,000, a sign-on bonus of $300,000 and a $200,000 completion bonus, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Gilmartin said she’s up for the task of changing the company while continuing to run MAG Partners — which she said is having its staff step up to help run it — and searching for a permanent CEO. She’s confident in Mack-Cali because she said it already has most of what it needs to turn around.

“It’s been really intense, but really, really great,” she said. “You need great assets and you need great people. Mack-Cali has both.”

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Covid is Forcing Real-Estate Developers to Rethink Buildings

Someday, years from now, a resident will wake up in their luxury condominium at developer Gregg Covin’s The Cedars Lodge & Spa in Hendersonville, N.C. They’ll make breakfast on the island in their big kitchen and sit on their heated balcony. They’ll walk out of their private entrance and use an elevator that serves only three other units. They’ll work out in a series of small exercise rooms and gather with friends at a restaurant in a glass atrium.

Hopefully, Covid-19 will be a distant memory. But every aspect of these homes will have been shaped by the pandemic.

Mr. Covin tore up his original plan for a part-hotel, part-condo project with small kitchens, few balconies and large amenity spaces, and began redrawing the concept in March. “For sure, there are going to be long-term changes in behavior because of this,” said Mr. Covin, who still aims to break ground this year.

One of the trickiest parts of a luxury real-estate developer’s job is divining what buyers and renters will value—and pay top dollar for—in the three, four or even five years it takes to go from design to completion. Covid-19 has made that more complex, as developers try to tease out which parts of the pandemic experience will fade away and which will remain as part of the culture.

Some costs can be passed on to the renters or buyers who want the changes enough to pay more for them. Mr. Covin, for example, was originally planning units in the $300,000 to $500,000 range, but now thinks buyers will pay $350,000 to $750,000 for larger units that can be used as second homes.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Rental developers also are betting the postcrisis market will reward them for adding or installing specialized furniture that can make a small space seem larger so residents can work from home more comfortably. Other changes aimed at improving air quality or enabling distancing from other residents—such as re-engineering ventilation systems, adding elevator banks, or reconfiguring common areas—may help lower resistance to high-rise living, a lifestyle that has taken a beating in this crisis.

There is evidence already that the amenities and elements valued by the rental market have changed since the pandemic hit. Luke, a conversation-friendly real-estate chatbot that texts listings to apartment hunters in New York City, analyzed 30,000 messages from potential renters between December and February and compared them with those between March and May.

The New York-based company found that requests for home offices rose from 0.5% of messages prepandemic to 3% once the pandemic hit. Private outdoor space requests jumped by 20%, while requests for in-unit laundry (a rarity in New York City) went up 17%. Interest in gyms plummeted. Requests fell by 10% for in-building gyms and by 50% for gyms nearby.

In San Francisco, 30 Van Ness, a 47-story multiuse building with 333 condos located a block from Twitter’s headquarters, is slated for completion in late 2023, said Arden Hearing, executive general manager, West Coast, for Lendlease. Even with that distant time horizon, the pandemic prompted numerous design changes.

“Because of Covid, we’ve thought a lot more about stairs,” he said. To encourage residents to use them, and decrease elevator density, the project will now have stairs that are wider and carpeted, with art and natural light, he said.

Until March 15, the amenity plan also featured an open 12,000-square-foot space for co-working by day and lounging by night. New blueprints, Mr. Hearing said, divide that space to include a music studio, a fitness area, art space, a cooking-and-dining area and a screening lounge.

Some sections will have glass partitions, to give a sense of togetherness while creating physical separation. Many will exit to an outdoor area. The building also will include horizontal ventilation, with each residential unit having its own system, as opposed to the traditional vertical system that filters air throughout a tower, he said.

The HVAC upgrades alone will add several million dollars to the project, Mr. Hearing said. The investment is expected to differentiate the project from older buildings and help with marketability, he added.

In New York, MaryAnne Gilmartin, founder and chief executive of MAG Partners, plans to begin construction later this year on 241 West 28th Street, a 480-unit rental building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

She said much of the original plan should play well in the postcrisis era, citing its two towers connected by a garden, allowing for shorter and less-crowded elevator rides than with a single tower, and more outdoor space. Still, the crisis has inspired her to upgrade air filters, create a separate entry for deliveries, and add touchless elements that let residents use their phones to call elevators and open doors.

At Echelon, a 14-unit project in the design phase in Delray Beach, Fla., developer John Farina had planned four elevators. In early April, he changed to eight elevators, so that no resident would have to share an elevator with more than two other units.

Mr. Farina, president and chief executive of U.S. Construction, said he made the change in light of how successful another Delray Beach project, called Ocean Delray, has been. The 19 units, priced from $5 million to $9 million and slated for completion in early 2021, are half sold, he said. Each unit will have a private air-conditioned garage, and four will have private elevators.  

The pandemic has made some developers re-evaluate the economics underpinning their projects. Mr. Covin said that after a long career developing luxury projects in downtown Miami, he is switching to North Carolina because he believes there will be heavy demand for second homes at the midpoint of the East Coast—and less interest in dense city living.

Scott Brennan sees a strong market for luxury single-family homes in Florida. He developed an 8,000-square-foot house on the market for $14.5 million in Boca Raton. He had an additional piece of land on which he planned four townhouses with a common pool and green space. 

Now, because the pandemic has reduced interest in shared amenities, he plans to build just two homes, with private yards and space for home gyms and offices.

“The original house suits the Covid discussion perfectly,” said Mr. Brennan, who happened to have opted for expanses of retractable glass doors that give the home plenty of flexible indoor-outdoor space. The new homes will be similarly designed, he said.

Colin Behring, chief executive of Behring Co., based in San Ramon, Calif., already has 1900 Broadway in Oakland under construction, but he has planned alterations.

He said working from home will be increasingly important, but it isn’t financially viable to make the apartments larger. Instead, more units—25% rather than 5%—will have furniture by a Boston-based startup called Ori. Designs include beds that drop from the ceiling to the floor at the push of a button, or that retract into a home-office module. The 39-story building is set to be completed in late 2022.

A Rental Complex in Quincy, Mass.

This project, in the permit stage, had to be altered to allow for more access to the outdoors. The solution, shown in this rendering, was to add balconies that will give some tenants a way to get fresh air and sunshine. PHOTOS: LBC BOSTON AND PCA (2, RENDERINGS)

Among the most common design changes made by developers is adding outdoor space or increasing access to those spaces. In a rental project in Quincy, Mass., now in the permit phase, developer LBC Boston is adding balconies to about a quarter of the units, said Margarita Kvacheva, senior vice president. “We are strategically placing the balconies on the south side, because those get the daylight and that’s where people can go out and get vitamin D,” she said.

At Natiivo Miami, a 51-story multiuse building in the Florida city slated to break ground this year and to be completed by late 2022, developer Keith Menin is planning retractable glass walls. Though expensive, he said they would be valuable in linking common areas—such as a gym and a walkway to the pool—to outdoor spaces.

“This could be the new norm,” Mr. Menin said.

Touchless systems, already a luxury amenity, are becoming necessities, developers said. Ric Campo, chairman and chief executive of Camden Property Trust, began rolling out Chirp, a virtual leasing platform, in the company’s 164 rental buildings last year.

The system lets prospective renters set up an appointment, be guided by a map from a parking space to the unit, gain entry via a code, tour the unit alone, and sign the lease online. Residents can use fobs or their phones instead of keys, Mr. Campo said.

Home is Where the Stethoscope Is

Several Florida developers are linking projects to the medical industry, giving buyers technology, service and access to special care.

Buy a House, Get a Year of Telemedicine

Miami-based developer CC Homes, which builds about 500 single-family homes a year, will provide buyers at its Canarias in Downtown Doral development with a year subscription to Baptist Health Care on Demand, said chief executive Jim Carr, who is also chairman of the board at Baptist Health South Florida. Buyers of the $500,000 to $2 million houses will receive a home-exam kit with stethoscope, tongue depressor, otoscope for ear exams and a thermometer that feeds information to telemedicine providers at Baptist. The year’s subscription costs about $1,000 per family, Mr. Carr said.

Someone Hot Just Entered the Building

2000 Ocean, a 64-unit condo building in Hallandale Beach, Fla., will have infrared cameras in the lobby to detect when someone walks in with an elevated temperature, said developer Shahab Karmely, of KAR Properties. Buyers of units, opening in May 2021 at $2.7 million to $12 million, will also receive an iPad and home medical kit. The developer said he won’t dictate how the fever information will be used, nor will he link the iPad to a telemedicine service. “We are supplying the technology,” he said. “How it will be used is up to the homeowners themselves.”

Neighbors in Scrubs

Developer Daniel Kodsi is negotiating with a medical center to occupy the 100,000-square-foot medical building abutting his 55-story Legacy Hotel & Residences in Miami World Center. The project, due in 2023, was originally meant to capitalize on the booming medical-tourism industry. Now that coronavirus is upon us, Mr. Kodsi believes it will be viewed as a benefit to buyers of the $300,000 to $2 million condos. “Imagine a shelter-in-place situation, and having doctors, nurses and a pharmacy right downstairs,” Mr. Kodsi said. “Health is the new wealth,” reads the website for the project.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at [email protected]

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Rent-a-CEO: Inside Gilmartin’s short-term gig at Mack-Cali

After a massive shakeup of Mack-Cali’s board, MaryAnne Gilmartin is temporarily stepping in as the New Jersey-based real estate investment trust’s CEO.

Gilmartin, through an agreement between Mack-Cali and her company MAG Partners, will serve as CEO for six months or until the company finds a replacement, whichever happens first, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mack-Cali, in turn, will pay MAG Partners a monthly fee of $150,000 and offer a one-time cash sign-on bonus of $300,000 and a completion bonus of $200,000 at the end of Gilmartin’s term, according to filings. An activist investor had pushed for the resignation of Mack-Cali CEO Michael DeMarco since earlier this year.

MAG Partners has also been offered a fully vested stock option to purchase up to 230,000 shares of common stock at $14.39 per share, and up to 100,000 shares of common stock at $20 per share. Gilmartin is still serving as chair of Mack-Cali’s board, which will lead the search for a permanent CEO.

“I think this is going to be an awesome gig. There are many many people who have been sidelined for lots of reasons. Or have just been looking for something new, given that the world order has shifted,” Gilmartin said in an interview Monday. “I’m wildly confident that we will have a great selection of talent.”

Gilmartin said she’s not “stepping away in any significant way” from MAG Partners, the development firm she launched last year as a spinoff from the partnership she formed with L&L Holding nearly two years prior. Her team — largely made of Forest City alums — will continue to handle day-to-day operations. MAG Partners is one of several firms looking to develop part of the former Amazon site in Long Island City. Most recently, the company signed letter of intent for a ground lease with Trinity Real Estate to develop a 150,000-square-foot boutique office at 122 Varick Street.

Mack-Cali, meanwhile, has been shifting its strategy from operating suburban offices to acquiring multifamily and office properties on the Hudson County waterfront. In December, the REIT agreed to sell its entire suburban office portfolio to a joint venture led by Onyx Equities in a deal valued at $288.5 million. Last March, it unloaded a 56-building portfolio in Westchester and Fairfield for $487.5 million.

Gilmartin was one of four board directors who had criticized Mack-Cali’s leadership in May, amid the REIT’s proxy fight with investor Bow Street. Gilmartin — along with three other board directors backed by Bow Street — said other members of the board put a “rubber stamp” on decisions favored by ousted CEO DeMarco, Bloomberg reported at the time. Bow Street, which owns a 4.9 percent stake in Mack-Cali, ultimately won eight of the nine board of director seats last month. Gilmartin was named chair.

In a March letter to shareholders, Bow Street had called for DeMarco to resign, accusing him of various missteps, including ignoring viable bids from companies interested in acquiring Mack-Cali. A representative for Bow Street declined to comment. DeMarco, who replaced Mitch Rudin as CEO in 2017, couldn’t immediately be reached.

Daniel Ismail, an analyst at Green Street Advisors who covers Mack-Cali, said the CEO switch was expected by investors, given the recent shakeup of the board. He expects activist investors to continue pushing for a sale or merger of the company. He noted that Gilmartin has experience working for a public REIT, Forest City, which was also sold shortly after she left the company.

“There’s probably a lot that can be reconfigured,” he said. “But in this environment — in the middle of a pandemic — many of these large strategic things are going to be difficult, as is looking for a permanent CEO.”

When asked about her goals as interim CEO, given her criticism of previous leadership, Gilmartin pointed to the reconfigured board, which aims to create an “independent transparent board that focuses on governance and strategy.” She sees herself as an intermediary between management and the board and says she is focused on company culture.

“There is no direction yet as to the board’s thinking on strategy because the board has really just been reconstituted,” she said. “There’s no great reveal yet because the work has really yet to be done.”

Rich Bockmann contributed reporting.

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MaryAnne Gilmartin Appointed Interim CEO of Mack-Cali

Real estate titan MaryAnne Gilmartin, who cut her teeth at Forest City Ratner and went on to form a partnership with David Levinson and Rob Lapidus before leaving to start MAG Partners last year, has been appointed interim Chief Executive Officer at Mack-Cali, according to a release from the real estate investment trust.

In addition, Tammy K. Jones, Co-Founder and CEO of Basis Investment Group, was named Lead Independent Director of the REIT.

Prior to today’s announcement, both Gilmartin and Jones had been serving on Mack-Cali’s board. The release said that Gilmartin will continue to also operate MAG Partners. There was little said about where the previous CEO, Michael DeMarco, is going, other than a statement of thanks from Gilmartin.

“On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank Michael for his service to Mack-Cali,” Gilmartin said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the talented Mack-Cali team and all of our stakeholders to ensure that the Company operates at the highest level.”

However, there had been a concerted push for DeMarco’s removal from Bow Street LLC, a New York-based investment firm that owned 4.5 percent of Mack-Cali’s stock. Bow Street called for just such action in an open letter published in March. “It is now clear that the rot at Mack-Cali goes far deeper than any of us knew,” the letter said, “and that more comprehensive action is required to protect shareholders’ investment.”

#72 MaryAnne Gilmartin Founder and CEO at MAG Partners

“Resiliency” is a word that gets thrown around a lot right now, but for some executives, the belief in a rebound is deeply rooted in experience. “Right after 9/11, when we were building The New York Times building,” recalled MaryAnne Gilmartin, who was then at developer Forest City Ratner, “people were like, ‘No one is going to want to be in a skyscraper ever again.’”

Her point is that you don’t bet against New York, the city that she has loved fiercely ever since growing up in Far Rockaway, Queens. Yes, today there’s a pandemic, but “developers,” Gilmartin said, “are hopeless optimists.”

Certainly her Happy Warrior buoyancy has played out well for the City in the past. In a career spanning more than two decades at FCR—the last six as CEO—Gilmartin added not just the Times Building, but also the Barclays Center, Frank Gehry’s downtown Spruce Street tower, and the Tata Center at Cornell Tech to the skyline.

In March 2020, she took her optimism to its logical extension by forming her own firm, MAG Partners. “For me to own 100 percent of the company is a big move for me,” noted Gilmartin. “As much as I love risk, I also knew that I was taking on a team of people whose livelihood depended on me.”

For two years she had been at L&L MAG, a partnership with Robert Lapidus and David Levinson, but, “after the first couple of deals with L&L, I realized that people would back me with my track record.”

Umm, yeah!

Now on the drawing board are three projects. She is part of a four-developer team in Long Island City (“we call it Amazon Redux: It will be a veritable job engine for Queens, and we’re doing it with the community at the table,” noted Gilmartin). Downtown, her firm is working on 122 Varick, an office building on land leased from Trinity Church. She explained her vision, “I could have the first office building in that submarket, which is Google and Disney all day long.” On the residential front, she is building a 480-unit rental at 241 West 28th Street, 30 percent of which will be affordable.

“We are really nimble,” she said of MAG Partners, “because we have sites, not buildings, so a lot of my thinking is ‘how is this building going to perform in a post-COVID world?’ Now I’m focused on things like ‘what are we going to care out about forever?’”

To her full plate, last month she added the chairmanship of Mack-Cali. Gilmartin, who is also on the board of NY Public Radio and BAM, had been a director of the Jersey City-based REIT for a year after being elected as part of an activist slate. New York City might be a little jealous about sharing her, but if Gilmartin’s history is any indication, there’s plenty of her positive energy to go around.—A.R.

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For Blue-Sky Urban Ideas, It May Be Now or Never

Last month, I passed through Tribeca, which was deathly quiet, its storefronts armored in plywood. Suddenly, a mirage appeared: a woman, coiffed and made up, wearing a skirt and high heels, strode down a deserted block, swinging a white handbag. She seemed like an alien who had dropped in on our world of stay-at-home schlumps, or maybe just a visitor from another year, a normal person highlighting just how abnormal our city had become. A few weeks later, New York is starting to feel like New York again, though fitfully, and still with a streak of the surreal. The racket has returned, with construction crews and traffic once more drowning out birds. A few streets are alive with sidewalk drinkers, although much of midtown still lies under its cone of silence. The woman with the handbag might blend in again.

It’s too soon for celebration, and the picture is too mixed for optimism. But at least, after months of eternal present, the future is coming into view: we can at last begin to look ahead, and not just with dread. New York is beginning to rethink many of its ossified assumptions. You can see it in the push to strip hundreds of millions of dollars from the NYPD, in the mayor’s executive order commandeering privately owned public spaces for the common good, in the short-order network of bike lanes and open streets, in the multiplication of dedicated busways, in the conversion of hotels to housing for the homeless. Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio have wisely held off letting restaurants operate indoors, where diners are at the mercy of unreliable air-conditioning systems. If, come cooler weather, distrust of the great indoors persists and restaurants can’t lure customers back into their dining rooms, New York should invest heavily in heat lamps, emulating Northern Europe’s virtually year-round outdoor dining culture—not just in the brunchiest zip codes, but along, say, Dyckman Street or wherever New Yorkers eat.

Some of these measures are temporary or insufficient, but they suggest a willingness to draft in the wake of bolder cities. Paris has just reelected mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has made pedestrianizing and de-polluting her city so central to her campaign that she recently floated a proposal to turn its beltway, the much-loathed Périph, into a more leisurely, verdant, and crossable boulevard. New York should aspire to similarly transformative moves.

We tend to treat cities like the weather, using past patterns to predict outcomes over which we have no control. But the last few months have reminded us that cities are not givens, the status quo isn’t immovable, and citizens can force their elected officials to crash through bureaucracy and inertia. As New Yorkers emerge from a bitter spring and weeks of angry but hopeful protest, we can—must—recognize that after the fears of infection comes a point of inflection in the city’s history when its future is up for grabs. What will happen is what we make happen.

During the most heated days of the protests, I watched crowds march for a more equitable city, and worried that New York seemed suddenly, intensely fragile. A deadly shot, an out-of-control fire, a spate of destruction—any of these could have marked New York for a generation, and I wasn’t sure how great a body blow it could absorb before it began to conform to Trumpian fever dreams. My optimism about the city’s resilience ebbed by the minute. The crisis administered local and national governments all over the world a brutal series of tests, and the record is not good. They failed to contain the epidemic. While some East Asian cities managed to blunt its worst effects, New York couldn’t. Could the nation take necessary public health actions without bringing financial catastrophe on millions of households? Nope. Could we finally bring the contagion under control, or start opening up without triggering a new assault? Depends where you look. The cost of incompetence has been horrific.

Now New York’s leaders are confronting another round of challenges. The most immediate question is: Can we keep the city from entering a death spiral, where residents pull up stakes, revenues fall, the city becomes less appealing, causing more people to leave, and so on? The key to preserving New York’s magnetism is to restore its feeling of safety—from crime, from the cops, and from coronavirus.

Even before the pandemic, moving around New York was always a leap of faith. You had to trust that almost everyone in the swarms around you would behave with respect and a sense of cooperative sense of sharing. Urban living is a form of minute-by-minute collaboration. Conflict, cruelty, and violence are everyday occurrences, but they are also relatively rare. Every rush hour, millions of people brush past one other without incident, packing subway platforms without acting on an urge to shove, sharing elevators without fear of being stabbed, ordering at Shake Shack without worrying that the milkshake is poisoned.

Getting back to daily life means rebuilding that delicate web of trust. If I’m going to ride the subway, I have to assume that the man sitting next to me takes the same sorts of reasonable precautions I do. Before we can function normally, we must each be convinced that new habits and protocols are sensible, and that restaurants, employers, schools, and public agencies all scrupulously follow them. And then we have to make a greater leap, and learn to trust governments that have let us down.

Change is risky, but business as usual is Russian roulette: keep at it long enough, and death is sure to follow. An $8 billion crevasse has opened in the budget of the MTA, leading the agency to halt all work on its five-year capital plan. Not enough people are riding the subway, so we have no money; do we really want to let the system go to hell so that nobody wants to ride the subway ever again? Those who can drive will, causing gridlock that makes East Midtown during the United Nations General Assembly seem like a desert highway. The more commuters rely on their cars, the more they will fight any attempt to claw some pavement back for restaurant tables, bike paths, pedestrian plazas, and bus lanes. SUVs will spread like bishop’s weed, smog will refill the air, and professionals will jump at the chance to stay in the suburbs and work remotely.

In the past 20 years, as the number of tourists and New Yorkers has continued to grow along with the economy, there were those who felt that the city city was being swamped. Yet we can’t let this become a place where only the hardy and hopeless choose to stay. I’m less worried about spooked residents’ fleeing—that’s a fine New York tradition—than about potential newcomers’ being unable to arrive. For now, the gates remain closed: immigration has all but stopped, flights from abroad are scarce, and Cuomo has made it clear that visitors and returnees from Florida, Texas, and other virus-stricken states are welcome only if they commit to quarantine. The prolonged freeze will deepen the city’s wounds. “I’ve seen other external shocks to our industry,” says Vijay Dandapani, head of the Hotel Association of New York City. “After 9/11 and the Great Recession, it took a year and a half for revenue growth to happen. But in both those cases, occupancy never dropped below 60 percent. Now, there’s no pulse.” (During the pandemic, it has dipped as low as 16 percent.) Dandapani says he figures it will be five years before the tourism industry begins to resemble 2019 again.

Impromptu decisions can have long-term implications if we pay attention: Treat those who cry for justice as an enemy horde and you will divide your city further; treat them as teachers and you can heal. In Aurora, Colorado, a protest to commemorate the death of Elijah McClain summoned violinists for “an improvised harmonization,” which wound up so alarming the police that they tried to break up the concert with riot gear. Even so, the electric fiddler Jeff Hughes jumped on a truck and kept the music going. String-instrument actions are going national: another took place a few days later in Washington Square, and it was not  treated as a security threat.

After months of communing with our devices, we badly need live music. Traditional venues will stay dark for the rest of the year, but in the meantime, the city might breathe life into New York’s musical life by seeding it outdoors. The Department of Cultural Affairs should team up with cultural heavy hitters like Lincoln Center, plus Make Music New York, an organization that mounts a twice-annual solstice celebration with more than a thousand concerts, large and small, all across the city. One of my indelible musical memories is from a decade ago, when I drifted in a rowboat out onto the lake in Central Park and listening to Iannis Xenakis’s Persephassa as it was performed by percussionists ranged along the shore. The year before, Bang on a Can launched an avant-garde marching band, Asphalt Orchestra, that could be revived as a rapid-deployment morale booster, popping up around New York for half an hour of joyful mayhem. Pop-up concerts, chamber music flash mobs, socially distanced dance parties, and parking lot recitals can be quick, small, cheap, and safe. They would go a long way to bringing some joy back to New York’s streets and keep the death spiral at bay.

As we navigate these next fluid months, we should be thinking about another question that will test New York’s character: Can we learn the right lessons from our overlapping crises—disease, discrimination, and threats to democracy—and put them into action, even after the immediate sense of emergency has passed? Passing that test means baking principles of equity into the zoning code and development plans, intensifying the fight to control pollution and climate change, rethinking the way New Yorkers move around the city, and reopening the spigots that bring in immigrants, visitors, and workers from other states to refresh the city’s economy.

Even as the city pares its budget and prunes its payroll, we can’t just hunker down and hope for the best. We need to intensify our ambitions for the developments and public projects that will define the next iteration of New York. We still need Gateway or its equivalent (the new passenger-rail tunnel beneath the Hudson), a transformed Penn Station, a new Port Authority, and a less noxious version of the BQE. (Yes, tax revenue has tanked and federal funding may have to wait for a changing of the guard in Washington, but there’s plenty of planning to do in the meantime.) Sunnyside Yard still holds promise as an anti-Hudson Yards. The areas of Long Island City that Amazon walked away from in 2018 can still benefit from large-scale development. “I’m bullish on Queens,” says MaryAnne Gilmartin, one of the developers involved in a mixed-use project next to the ex–-Amazon site. “The problem is to get people to stop reacting and think ahead. Even though the [city’s] Economic Development Corporation is hard-wired to think about the future, right now they’re mired in the present.”

A crisis is a challenge to our notion of impossibility. It inflicts on us circumstances we thought fantastical, and reminds us that distant threats quickly become real. Climate change will be like that. But it also teaches us not to despair. What we thought was impossible is doable. During the pandemic, we moved our social, work, and cultural lives online. We survived without planning ahead. And through it all, we preserved our indignation, our moral instincts and our sense of shame. We emerged ready to ask not just What’s gonna happen next? but: How do we get to the city we want to live in?

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New offices outside Manhattan depend on millennial lifestyle after Covid-19

Later this year a new 500,000-square-foot office building will open in Downtown Brooklyn with the latest technology, including fingerprint scanning, options for individual air-conditioning units for tenants, high ceilings, no columns and no elevator buttons. One Willoughby Square, said developer Morris Jerome, is the perfect building for the post-pandemic world in the perfect place.

Meanwhile in Queens, a consortium of four developers working on a proposal for a Long Island City waterfront property once planned for Amazon’s second headquarters has revamped its plan to increase the amount of office space to 5 million or 6 million square feet in the belief that the new normal will compel companies to locate closer to where their employees live.

“Companies need talent and need to be where the talent is,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, who spent years working on the development of Brooklyn and is now part of the Queens consortium. “That talent is predominately in the boroughs and especially Brooklyn and Queens.

Developers, brokers and business leaders say the pandemic has made the case for relocating employees to Brooklyn and Queens stronger than ever. The long-term trend of some companies—especially so-called innovation economy companies—moving to those two boroughs to tap the talented young professionals who live there has now become the best way for the city to develop additional business districts that can shorten commutes and allow many employees to walk or bike. Of course, the space is much cheaper than in Manhattan, and the renewal of the Relocation and Assistance Program incentive in the budget passed in the spring cuts rents by an additional $10 to $15 a square foot.

They don’t have any leases yet to prove their point. More important, their plans depend on two crucial assumptions. One is that working from home will not reduce the demand for office space so much that no new space is needed. The other is that the millennials and young families who have transformed Brooklyn and Queens remain committed to the city, and the pandemic and economic shutdown haven’t made the group more interested in moving to the suburbs or beyond.

Brooklyn, in particular, had already established itself as a home to technology and media companies, with both online craft seller Etsy and Vice Media headquartered there. The Brooklyn Navy Yard and Industry City have made themselves destinations for a combination of innovative manufacturing companies, design firms, film studios and sports teams, including the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.

“Companies were discovering the waterfront, with affordable places, more green space and shorter commutes, before the pandemic,” said Andrew Kimball, chief executive of Industry City. “That is our leasing model.” Industry City says it is close to signing a lease with a firm that had planned to move to the Hudson Square neighborhood before employees balked at returning to Manhattan.

Cost remains a key to luring companies. Asking rents in Industry City are bracketed around $30 a square foot, with Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City at about $50. The renewal of the REAP tax credit in the state budget provides an annual tax break of up to $3,000 per employee for 12 years, reducing the effective rate by anywhere from $10 to $15 a square foot. The average asking rent in virtually all of Manhattan in the first quarter was $75 a square foot, with tax incentives limited mostly to downtown and Hudson Yards.Crowded commutes

The pandemic has made this proposition more compelling, both because people are wary of crowded commutes into Manhattan and because the city’s stated commitment in both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations to a five-borough economy has become even more of a necessity.

For example, the key selling point of Downtown Brooklyn is that so many people can walk to their job, said Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Regina Myer. When businesses start to look for space in Long Island City, added LIC Partnership President Elizabeth Lusskin, they discover many of their employees already live there. The outer boroughs can be the city’s best defense against a flight to the suburbs, Lusskin added.

Landlords and developers have instituted a variety of strategies to pursue office tenants for Brooklyn and Queens.

Industry City says it is open to leases of any length as companies want to make only short-term decisions while the long-term consequences of the pandemic are sorted out. “Tenants are asking, ‘Can we move somewhere for a year or two?’ ” said leasing director Kathe Chase, who allows companies to take more space or less as needed.

However, if the work-from-home experience of the pandemic proves to be long-lasting and companies like Facebook remain convinced that eventually half the workforce will be doing that, there simply may be no need for additional office space.

If the millennials and young families who have flocked to Brooklyn and Queens decide the city is no longer for them, the argument for being located where the talent is evaporates. 

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Fordham REI and Gilmartin of L&L MAG present Heroes and Champions (+ One)

On Thursday, November 14^th, some of real estate’s biggest names gathered for a night of cocktails and conversation when Fordham Real Estate Institute (REI) and MaryAnne Gilmartin, co-founder and CEO of L&L MAG, presented Heroes and Champions (+ One). 

The invite-only event, held at the University’s Lincoln Center campus, celebrated the third anniversary of REI and featured a fireside chat between Gilmartin and Dr. Anthony Davidson, dean, Fordham School of Professional and Continuing Studies (PCS).

“Throughout MaryAnne’s years in real estate, you can see how much here in New York has been accomplished simply because of her vision and drive. She’s been a true friend to the Real Estate Institute and its because of her that we have been able to host numerous events focused on how woman can play more of an influential role and have an even greater impact on the real estate industry,” said Dr. Davidson. “A big part of what we do at REI, and what MaryAnne does in her own career, focuses on how we can mentor people going forward. We are grateful for the ongoing support of the real estate community, not only for our programs but for our students as well.”

During the event, Gilmartin, a Fordham alum who also serves as a special advisor to the REI Executive Advisory Council, stressed the importance of self-confidence and paying it forward by providing support to team members and mentees.

“Real estate’s a tough game, but I never did get the message that said I should be intimidated and cower with all the men around the table. I believed if I was there and I added value, I had a place. And if I knew my stuff then I could participate,” said Gilmartin. “As I grew in my career, I also recognized the importance of supporting those around you to reach their goals. It’s one of the reasons why I am involved with REI and why I look forward to conversations like the ones we had tonight.”

Heroes and Champions (+ One) was sponsored by Sound Communications and Co-Communications, Inc. 

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“Conviction and appetite to do it myself”: MaryAnne Gilmartin talks spinoff from L&L

When L&L MAG was formed nearly two years ago, there was a carveout option: MaryAnne Gilmartin could eventually strike out on her own. Now, she’s going that route.

“I have the conviction and appetite to do it myself,” she told The Real Deal on Sunday.

She will spin off from the company she started with L&L Holding’s David Levinson and Robert Lapidus and form what she described as a “truly woman-owned” firm, MAG Partners.
Crain’s first reported the split, under which the two companies could still work together.

When Gilmartin left Forest City to launch L&L MAG in 2018, she said she felt her “finest work is yet to come.” She wanted to focus on ground-up development — an area the real estate investment trust had been moving away from. Forest City was purchased that same year by Brookfield Asset Management for $6.8 billion.

The partnership with L&L served as a bridge for Gilmartin as she transitioned from a public company with an enormous balance sheet to a private one where she’d need to build relationships with investors to finance development. Not only did Gilmartin benefit from L&L’s existing connections, but the two forged new ones as part of L&L MAG. She pointed to Atalaya Capital Management, which didn’t have prior relationships with either L&L or Gilmartin. The firm invested in L&L MAG’s 460-unit residential project at 241 West 28th Street in Chelsea. Another firm that is investing in the project, Australian firm Qualitas, had met Gilmartin during her Forest City days.

But not all relationships will transfer to MAG Partners. For instance, Gilmartin said her new firm will not work with the $500 million joint venture which L&L and California pension fund CalSTRS launched prior to the creation of L&L MAG.

Since the firm’s launch, L&L MAG started the West 28th Street project and became a development partner at 44-02 Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City. The Queens site could be included in a potential rezoning, though it’s also embroiled in a long-standing foreclosure fight. The Durst Organization, which owns the debt on the property, has been trying to foreclose on the six-acre site for more than a decade. It’s unclear whether L&L will work on the Long Island City project.

Crain’s also previously reported that L&L MAG is competing against Silverstein Properties and Brookfield to develop 5 World Trade Center. Representatives for L&L didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.

Gilmartin declined to discuss other projects that her new firm is considering. But she reiterated her desire to lead a development where a woman is responsible for every facet.

“There are women in every aspect of the real estate cycle that are rock stars and best in class,” she said. “One would not have to compromise in any way, shape or form to do that.”

She added that, of course, men can live and work at the project, joking, “It’s not that we’re going to keep the men out.”

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