Jon Gray’s running videos - the sweaty titan scampering across skylines while giving off-the-cuff updates about Blackstone’s business – have become the most powerful pieces of content marketing in LinkedIn history. They’ve spawned thousands of copycats across the corporate world, execs who hope to sprint, swim, bike and thinkboi their way into the public consciousness. The basic idea: Show that you’re a person, not just a risk-adjusted black box, and maybe it’ll be easier for your firm to attract capital and deal flow.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, New York’s CRE strivers have taken it way too far. Armed with the terrible power of ChatGPT and CapCut, they’ve unleashed a torrent of try-hard posts on the community. Engagement is a hell of a drug, and when a certain post does numbers, a striver’s peers try to outdo him by upping the cringe.

(BTW, this letter is all in good humor w/ a lotta love – God knows we’ve likely indulged in cringe at some point.)

Take David Lloyd, a former Marcus & Millichap broker who co-founded Davean Holdings and also runs Lloyd Properties👇

Happy Chanukah to our readers from the tribe! Wishing you light & love – May the dreidel always fall in your favor 🕎

Generally sporting a cap or beanie, Lloyd posts multiple short videos daily. He drops pearls like, “Who cares about IQ? Now with AI, it’s gonna be all about EQ,” a breakdown of business-compatible battlefield principles, and our personal favorite, “charisma is the tech of human magnetism.” 🪞🧲 Now, most of these videos get only a handful of likes, but we suppose that’s where the Marcus broker training comes in handy.

Lloyd vids have become popular hate-watching among multifamily insiders, sources said, describing them as “LinkedIn abuse” that does the rounds in industry group chats. Joining Lloyd in the relatively fresh-faced class of ideas men is Kings Capital’s Jeffrey Znaty, who tends to crank the GPT dial up to 11. “The hardest part of being an operator isn’t finding deals,” Znaty writes. “It’s maintaining relationships.” Among those who gave him love was Keystone Equities’ Johnny Zamir, an OG of the craft w/ relatively high engagement. Zamir, whose bio reminds us to “Never let success get to your head and never let failure get to your heart,” mixes in vulnerability w/ gentle boasting. “Yes, I’ve transacted on +$1.5 billion of real estate. And yes, I still wrestle with deep insecurities.” His posts have the feel of a confessional walk on the beach. 🩴

And it’s not just owners in the mix. Noah Levenson, an attorney who describes himself as The Rent Sherpa, shares GPT images along w/ pithy anecdotes from the rent-stabilized trenches. “Before dawn, by lantern glow, #TheRentSherpa readies himself for the battle ahead, oral argument on a rent overcharge claim.”

There’s something else many of these digital sages have in common: They’re at the helm of adolescent firms investing in New York multifamily after the sector took existential hits in the form of the ‘19 rent reforms. IAIs and vacancy decontrol are no longer viable strategies to deregulate rent-stabilized units. So a number of these groups have focused on Sub-Rehabs, which allow for deregulation of buildings in really bad shape that landlords put significant 💕 into. As we explored last week, the Sub-Rehab strategy is now a regulatory flash point; New York AG Tish James and DHCR allege that Peak Capital (Alex Rabin, David Gomez) improperly deregulated units across 31 buildings. The industry’s anxiously awaiting the fate of that battle, because so many firms use the same playbook: pull off enough Sub-Rehabs to amass a portfolio that’s sellable to the big boys.

“We are assembling BK Brownstones as an institutional aggregation play,” Lloyd wrote last December. Statements like these are innocuous in normal times, but can attract unwanted attention when the heat is on. 

LinkedIn can also serve to rally the troops.

“There’s nothing quite like walking a building months after completion and hearing laughter echo through the halls that were once silent,” Peak’s Gomez posted at the end of October, weeks before a trade group he’s part of sued DHCR over changes to the Sub-Rehab program (and before the AG’s hammer fell). “Seeing families move in, kids running down the stairs, scooters in the hallways, or mini rainbow colored crocs by apartment doors — that’s the real return on investment.” 🚸

The Promote is here to bring you the most interesting & useful content in CRE, whether it was conceived in-house or whipped up in a righteous frenzy by some leather-jacketed coot in an Eastern Seaboard saloon 👨‍🦲 . Here we have a prime artifact of the latter, workforce housing investor @resetbasis (vetted, legit) deconstructing Nitya Capital (Swapnil Agarwal)’s syndicator pitch deck for a Sunbelt multi portfolio. The 2,661-unit package has an interesting backstory: prev sponsor Alan Stalcup’s GVA financed it through long-suffering debt fund LoanCore at a total capitalization of $564M ($212K/ 🚪 ), per the presentation; Nitya’s now looking to buy it via the lender at $417M ($157K/ 🚪 ). The highly levered (90%+) offering throws up several important Qs prospective investors should be asking, Qs about sales comps, exit pricing, stabilized YoC and whether the deal is as exclusive as touted. “These deals have been sloshing around the market for years,” @resetbasis writes. “LoanCore has been trying to find someone to bail them out for a very long time.” Read the whole thing 👇

More Nitya coverage here, GVA here, LoanCore here.

The Promote’s getting word that Fortis Property Group (Louis & Joel Kestenbaum) are poised to lose a massive site in Norwalk, CT that’s been the subject of intense litigation. In Oct., a superior court judge dismissed an appeal by developer Bozzuto, which owns a neighboring apt. building, to overturn the city’s approval of Fortis’ plans to build an MTA maintenance hub on part of the site at 10 Norden Pl. W Financial (Gregg Winter, David Heiden) had provided a bridge loan on the project in ‘22, and had worked through a couple loan mods w/ the Kestenbaum-led sponsor group, which court docs indicate includes Abraham Leser. An investor group is now moving to take title of a huge chunk – just under 30 acres – through foreclosure, according to comms we’ve seen. What’s next for the site?

A couple of extraordinary documents were added to the roster of the Nussbaum Files last week, documents that add weight to the claim that this may be one of the biggest escrow fraud schemes (allegedly) in New York real estate history. The first, an exhaustive list of creditors, debtors & assets as part of ABC (alt to Ch 11 bankruptcy) proceedings, and the second, a lawsuit that details how Mark Nussbaum-controlled escrow monies were funneled to CRE deals (both real & fugazi) run by Mendy Steiner. The Promote hit up our roster of heimish sources to get further color on the creditors listed, and we filtered the list to the 20 biggest (owed $1M+). Insiders: Have a look 👇