Zoom out far enough on most players making waves in a market, and a pattern usually emerges: A reset-basis bet, extreme conviction in one asset class or location; an equity partner w/ hot pockets. But every once in a while, you get an entity whose moves defy any conventional explanation. In New York right now, that entity is 99c: No one seems to understand its acquisition thesis or operating playbook. Everyone knows it’s flush AF, given that it’s backed by not one but two mega-wealthy families, the Bellinis and the Darts. It caught mainstream press attention for its experiment w/ cool at 175 Water. It’s now finalizing its latest purchase a short walk away, The Promote understands, and that’s Rudin’s 110 Wall Street. We couldn’t nail down exact pricing just yet, but reckon it’s in the $120M-$130M range (low $400s/ 🦶). This is a property best known for 2 things – being a high-profile casualty of Hurricane Sandy, and being a high-profile casualty of Adam Neumann’s WeWork.

99c didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company is so secretive that even some of its employees keep their affiliations w/ it private. But The Promote asked around and got some answers. 👇

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He’s back with a bang! But did he ever actually go away?

Joe Sitt, the kid from Gravesend who made it big in global CRE, is finalizing a $218M ($450/ 🦶) deal to buy ESRT’s office + retail property at 1359 Broadway, per CO. That’s ≈ ask for the 486K sf joint, which Tony Malkin’s REIT had put on the market via Newmark earlier this summer. Sitt’s Thor Equities has been active enough in its hometown – it did a $56M deal for a Nomad property in the spring. But it’s been a while since it bit off something meaty like this: If you came up in the 2000s/early 2010s, you’d remember Sitt, a compact man of considerable charm & moxie, as a big-game hunter who made runs at everything from New York’s toniest retail properties to Chicago’s massive Palmer House hotel and even the Empire State Building. He became a figure of key local media interest via his audacious plan to Vegasify the Coney Island boardwalk, even taking a shot at bringing a casino down there. (“People want to see the good guy win, the underdog win,” he said at the time, speaking to a reporter while on an F1 trip to Abu Dhabi.) After some black eyes in the retail reckoning of the mid 2010s (though he’s since made some reset-basis buybacks), Sitt shifted his focus to logistics, life sci, and of course data centers, while doubling down on int’l markets.

Five-ish years after proptech’s SPACtacular boom and inevitable bust, it’s been pretty rare to see new 🦄🦄 minted in the space. Relegated from the “tech” bucket into the more workmanlike “real estate” one, proptech startups went from raising tens and even hundreds of millions to far more modest sums (Some exceptions of course, including Bilt and anything Adam Neumann touches). But we now have a whopper round incoming: EliseAI, which uses AI agents for resi property management & healthcare, is in talks to raise $300M at a $3.7B valuation, per Business Insider: a16z (also lead investor in Neumann’s Flow) & BVP are in discussions to lead the round; the firms last invested at a $2.2B valuation in summer ‘25. Co-founded in ‘17 by Minna Song & Tony Stoyanov, the startup was working w/ over 2/3 of the NMHC 50 as of last year, and also crossed the $100M ARR threshold back then. Its first customer was Ofer Yardeni’s 👨‍🦲 Stonehenge, though it soon expanded beyond NYC to pick up national whales like AvalonBay and Equity Residential (now merged as the oddly pharmaceutical Vivmark). Here’s Song talking through the product/firm in detail w/ Thesis Driven. After years of sputtering disappointments (Pacaso 1⁄8, Sonder), could EliseAI be the golden child that proptech has been waiting for?

This week on the pod, we put on our toques and head to the TSX, where Meyer Orbach & Josh Gotlib are on a fascinating multifamily caper with their REIT GO Residential. Then, a back door into a special-servicer war, w/ Greystone accusing rival CWCapital of stealing trade secrets. And finally, a visit to a palatial, soon-to-be-empty office at 125 Park, where we assess the legacy of longtime Newmark CEO Barry Gosin – and what a new leader will be coming into. (Listen on Spotify, YouTube, Apple)
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