With 150 Charles Street and Now 10 Madison Square West, Steven Witkoff May Be the King of Condo Financing

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Mr. Cook, 71, still works at M&T as an executive vice president and chairman of the mortgage committee of the bank’s New York City advisory council, which approves its commercial mortgages for the metropolitan area, including the ongoing stream of deals from the Witkoff Group. The M&T veteran acknowledged that he took an almost paternal role with Mr. Witkoff in the first few years of his real estate career.

“I was always telling him in the early going, ‘You’re pretty leveraged here, you should pull something off the table on every deal and put some real liquidity away so that you can feed a building if it gets underwater,” Mr. Cook remembered. “Now when I see him, he says, ‘Hey John, my liquidity’s over $70 or $80 million.’ He can’t resist reminding me of that.

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“When Steve and Larry split apart, Larry took most of the residential stuff, while Steve took most of the office stuff and later diversified into other forms of real estate, including residential construction and rehab.”

In 1999, after Mr. Witkoff had become well accustomed to “putting real liquidity away,” Mr. Wiener of Wells Fargo (WFC) and the late Bernard Mendik, former chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York, asked him to join the executive committee of REBNY.

“I remember Bernie and Alan coming to me and saying, ‘You know you’re doing good things, and you’ve got to give back. We need young representation on the executive committee, so we’d like you to consider coming on board,’” said Mr. Witkoff. “These guys were icons to me, so my immediate response was, ‘If you’re asking, I’m honored and privileged. How could I say no?’

“A year or two later, I joked with Alan and told him, ‘Now I figured it out: you got me into this thing, but this was all about getting another checkbook to write charitable and political donations.’ Of course, I couldn’t say no to that either.”

When asked about that jovial conversation, which had taken place at a point when New York’s real estate market was in one of its primes, Mr. Wiener laughed at the thought, but said his professional appreciation for Mr. Witkoff went beyond his liquidity.

“Steve is incredibly knowledgeable about the market, he knows when to pull back, and he doesn’t overpay for things,” said Mr. Wiener, group head of Wells Fargo Multifamily Capital. “Wells Fargo is attracted to doing business with both him and Scott Alper because they’re good at what they do and they’re very hands-on, yet they don’t try to do too much at the same time. There are a lot of people in the business that don’t know what they’re doing,”

In Miami, Mr. Witkoff mingles with a different group of lenders than his old pals in the tristate area. The Witkoff Group recently began construction on a Hilton Cabana hotel on the northern end of Miami Beach that it partnered on with Highgate Holdings and real estate private equity firm Rockpoint Group and financed through a $40 million loan from Ladder Capital.

Mr. Witkoff and his team also recently purchased the former Wyndham Garden Hotel in Miami’s South Beach with the Carlyle Group, financed through a $25 million loan from UBS, as well as a large office building in Downtown Miami with Highgate, financed through a $50 million loan from Deutsche Bank (DB).

“The Miami financing market is much more inefficient than New York’s,” Mr. Witkoff noted. “There are significantly less lenders operating down there, even today. Three years ago there were way less, maybe two or three. Also, you can’t get the type of good pricing in Miami that you get here.

“There’s a perception that New York real estate is a lot more secure and that the market is more liquid and trades more easily, and it does. But the Miami marketplace is coming on pretty good, and I think when the banks do come in there and it does get more efficient, it’s only going to lead to further uptick in valuations.”

As the evening wound down and most of the New York office cleared out, Mr. Witkoff received a call from one of his business partners in Florida. He spent several minutes going over various project details to prepare before he flew out to Miami the following Monday. As with many of his day-to-day conversations, the business talk quickly turned to casual banter about golf, the weather and their respective families. The call carried on for about eight minutes, but Mr. Witkoff hadn’t lost his focus on the other conversation at hand when it wrapped up.

“It’s not that M&T and Wells Fargo refused anything I did down there; I just didn’t think to ask them,” he said after putting down his BlackBerry. “I didn’t get the feeling that that was something they had an appetite for. But I recently talked to Alan and Mike Kaczynski and the M&T guys, and each of them has said to me, ‘If you see things down there, we want to see them too.’”