“These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up.” - Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Two Frankfurters with Manhattan-sized appetites came here in the late 80s. The city was roaring, and the young men, Aby Rosen & Michael Fuchs, roared with it. By day, Rosen was hawking stateside property deals to German investors; by night, he was immersed in the club scene – he and Fuchs even bought into M.K., a legendary haunt of Basquiat and RuPaul. When the real estate crash came a few years later, the lads were ready to feast: They pooled their capital and connections and formed RFR Holding, which bought up ≈ 2.5M sf of offices on the cheap in the early 90s, gave them art-heavy makeovers, and leased them up at a healthy spread. 🖼

Combining an insider’s market nous with an outsider’s chutzpah and disdain for the pecking order, RFR eventually chased deals that used to be the reserve of New York’s storied real estate dynasties. Over the next 3-plus decades, it bought, repositioned, and sometimes lost skyline-defining properties, among them Lever House, the Seagram Building, and the Chrysler. The pandemic was an existential threat; RFR spent years in the workout trenches. Now, it is back on the hunt. Except this time, with Rosen & Fuchs both in their mid-60s and on different continents, there’s been a changing of the guard. 💂 💂

Going forward, The Promote understands, RFR’s stateside deals are being done and owned by RFR US, a holdco controlled by Aby and his two adult sons from his first marriage, Gaby and Charlie Rosen. The venture, formed this year, is targeting office, high-street retail and development deals. Fuchs, who’s based in Europe, has no stake in it. He remains partners with Aby on RFR’s legacy US and German holdings.

To say succession is a fraught issue in New York real estate is like saying Gary Barnett is a guy who’s ok with a bit of risk – true, but a wild understatement. Empires that took generations to build have been undone by warring cousins, soured partnerships, and the contrasting ambitions and work ethics of the next crop of principals. The market is littered with cautionary tales, from the Feils and Goldmans on the East Coast to the Seenos and the Brothers Jogani out west. Rosen and Fuchs, friends since they were in short pants, have looked to avoid this kind of drama through a clean geographic split.

RFR declined to comment for this story. This account is based on conversations with company insiders, property records, and dives into the archive. 👇

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Mayday

In May ‘24, the bombshell headline hit: “Aby Rosen was New York real estate royalty. Is his office empire crumbling?” It wasn’t in the trades, where a tough story can be countered by a principal granting an interview to reset the narrative, but in the FT, the salmon-colored broadsheet that’s a darling of the European and Wall Street elite. The article painted the picture of a flamboyant tycoon who flew too close to the sun. It flagged major challenges across the RFR portfolio: A torpedoed valuation at 285 Madison, an insolvent partner at the Chrysler, looming distress in Dumbo Heights, missed mortgage payments at 522 Fifth, and $2.5B in debt either coming up or past due. Twelve of the 16 loans analyzed were in some state of distress, noted the report, which also highlighted that RFR was facing heat from fmr. partners and lenders.

The stress was indeed severe – RFR did end up losing the Chrysler in dramatic fashion, as well as 285 Madison. But the piece, written by a banking rather than a CRE reporter, might’ve missed one industry-specific nuance: There isn’t a player of note – Donald Bren perhaps excepted – that is not at some point or the other navigating distress; being a CRE investor means signing up for a lifetime of Wile E. Coyote moments. The pandemic put scores of portfolios in a similar situation, and that collective agita created an environment more amenable to workouts and restructurings. Lenders might be cool taking back the keys from one troubled sponsor. But when several of their borrowers are delinquent, there’s an incentive to be more understanding.

Two years on, RFR appears through the worst of it. It has sold off at least 5 assets for north of $1.5B in the interim, per The Promote’s analysis, and is in the midst of selling 2 others. It executed a $1.2B refi of the Seagram Building, and found fresh debt for several formerly troubled buildings. Rialto, which in partnership w/ Blackstone and CPP bought a large CRE loan book from the now-defunct Signature Bank, had been smacking RFR around on several delinquent deals; those properties have either been refi’d w/ new lenders or worked out loan mods w/ Rialto, a source familiar w/ RFR said. 

“We are through that dance,” the source added. The Dumbo Heights complex, however, remains a question mark: RFR and Kushner Cos. secured an extension on the $480M debt in ‘24, but things still look shaky.   

On a number of strained deals, RFR was able to find graceful and sometimes even profitable exits. At 175 Third in Gowanus, for example, it defaulted on its $80M loan, which Madison Realty Capital & Marvin Azrak’s Maguire Capital promptly snapped up and reportedly looked to foreclose on. But by that fall, RFR struck a deal to sell the property for $160M+ to a Tavros Capital/Charney Cos. JV. In Feb. ‘25, it scored a $160M recap for a troubled office building at 475 Fifth. At 522 Fifth, when RFR slipped into default on its $224M Credit Suisse loan, SL Green wriggled into the capstack by snapping up the note for 60 cents/$. Before SLG could squeeze too hard, though, RFR sold the building to Amazon for $450M+. Meanwhile, at 980 Madison, it found the 1/1 buyer: Existing tenant Bloomberg Philanthropies agreed to pay a staggering $560M, which pencils to $4,700/ 🦶 as-built or $2,750/buildable 🦶. In Miami, an RFR/David Edelstein JV sold the W South Beach to the Reuben Bros. for $425M, or ≈$2M/key. And in Tel Aviv, RFR sold The Jaffa, a 120-key luxe hotel, for ≈$1M/ 🗝    

After all the exits, voluntary and otherwise, RFR’s current US portfolio is ≈ 10M sf, according to a source familiar with the firm. Much of that is office, with occupancy hovering around 95%, but RFR is also one of the largest privately held retail 🛍 owners in the country. Its latest acquisition under the new holdco is Prada’s UES home at 841 Madison, which it’s buying from the Safras for $57M ($3,350/ 🦶 ). It also made a play for the Brooks Brothers site at 346 Madison, next door to a tower it owns, but was pipped to the post by SL Green – the access road between the 2 properties is now the Strait of Hormuz. And it’s planning for a 1M+ sf Foster + Partners-designed project in Downtown Miami, which will include a tippy-top hotel & branded condos.

Unto His Sons

“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘You know what, I’m a lucky bastard.’” - Aby Rosen

At The Promote, we tend to sort developers into two main archetypes. There are the cowboys, the men with outsized risk appetites and brio who impose their will on the skyline – think of a Harry Helmsley or a Gary Barnett. And then there are the suits, the structured-finance junkies who dream in risk-adjusted returns, and who’ve come to dominate the modern sport of big-ticket real estate.

Aby Rosen falls squarely in the first category, but w/ an additional dimension: the aesthete. He built RFR’s rep as a steward of architecturally significant buildings, and has long used his art-world street cred to advance his CRE interests – in ‘06, the likes of Jeff Koons, Tory Burch and Ron Perelman spoke up in support of his proposed 30-story glass addition to 980 Madison (the novelist Tom Wolfe, meanwhile, was a key antagonist). Married to psychiatrist and Manhattan blue-blood Samantha Boardman, Aby is half of a couple that’s a fixture on the New York social scene and was once likened to a modern-day Bill and Babe Paley. A major landlord is among the most politically and socially connected people in a given city; a major landlord who also throws Art Basel’s hottest party has an extra X-factor. 

That cachet can be a differentiator in deals. At 980 Madison, for example, Aby was able to negotiate a deal directly with Mike Bloomberg. “We agreed on a price — and two days later, he closed on the property,” Rosen recently recalled. “I mean, he wrote a $560 million check!” A scion can learn how to underwrite a deal or push zoning limits as well as, or likely even better than, the founder. It’s harder, though, to bequeath the ability to get Bloomberg into a room.

Gaby and Charlie, now in their early 30s and late 20s respectively, started at the firm in ‘19, initially focused on acquisitions. Then Covid 🦠 hit, and the Rosens, like many other major landlords, went into triage mode – saving properties, restructuring debt, letting properties go. Gaby now oversees capital markets & portfolio management, with Charlie more on the retail arm. They’re tasked with expanding the firm’s capital relationships, both in RFR’s traditional stomping grounds of the US and Europe, and increasingly in Asia. Aby isn’t going anywhere – he’s still the guy with the hotline to Mayor Mike and his ilk – but day-to-day ops are increasingly falling to the sons. The Rosen lads, mindful of the mom-and-pop nature of even the biggest family firms, have looked to build out a real team around them: Company vet Tom Lavin was recently promoted to COO, Jon Ratner came in from Madison Capital to head up asset management, and an acquisitions unit is being fleshed out under Jonathan Cohen. The “nepo baby” tag is unavoidable when any founder’s kids step into a business of this scale. But over time, some shake it off by establishing their own Rolodex, loyalists, and track record.

Family Office

"I don't have friends, I got family."- Dom Toretto

CRE’s biggest family firms have taken different approaches to telegraphing succession. The Rudins opted to do a full-court media press, sitting down for several splashy interviews with the trades and the broadsheets (The PR rep who got near-identical messaging about the family’s patronage of the NYC marathon into TRD and CO back-to-back deserves a raise.) Multifamily titan Mitch Morgan stressed to Forbes that his boys were now running the show. In the late 2000s, the Elghanayan brothers, among New York’s most prolific developers, divvied up their empire with the help of a coin toss, and brought the Times along to watch.

RFR, by contrast, has kept the transition on the D/L. A source familiar w/ the firm confirmed the Rosen/Fuchs bifurcation after The Promote made inquiries, but there has been no formal announcement. The only hint we had was an interview last fall w/ CO, in which Aby said of Fuchs: “In the long run, I will probably run and own in America, he will run and own in Germany because he’s there physically.” Throughout the long partnership, Fuchs has kept a far lower profile. The few quotes given by Fuchs in the English-language press tend to be in profiles about Aby.

RFR insiders frame the new setup as a way to create a distinct mandate for Gaby and Charlie, and a clear succession plan for the firm’s American future. Fuchs and Aby remain in daily contact over the legacy portfolio, per Aby, and the families often vacation together.

“We met in nursery school,” Aby said of Fuchs in ‘14. “When we were 11, 12 years old, we were trading things. Michael and I have a long-lasting friendship. He’s like my surrogate brother. He does what he wants to do, I do what I want to do, but there’s nothing that comes between us.”