Access Industries’ Jonah Sonnenborn Does Not Shy From the Big, Unique Assets

Jonah Sonnenborn and his team at Access Industries have assembled a real estate portfolio of luxury, one-of-a-kind places and experiences. 

The global investment firm, which billionaire Len Blavatnik owns, has holdings across various sectors, including media, entertainment, technology and biotechnology. Sonnenborn has assembled the often opportunistic investments with one specific criteria in mind: Can Access Industries improve that real estate in a way that others can’t? 

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The current portfolio includes the Aman Residences (where a New York penthouse recently sold for $66 million); Faena hotels; the Grand Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat in France’s Côte D’Azur; L.A.’s Ford Factory, which is home to Warner Music (also owned by Access); and the Ocean Club in the Bahamas. Sonnenborn’s busy pipeline includes the condo and hotel One Highline in Manhattan with Witkoff, and the mixed-use condo and apartment complex Williamsburg Wharf in Brooklyn with Naftali Group. 

Amid his plane-hopping, Sonnenborn sat down with Commercial Observer at his office at 40 West 57th Street to talk luxury and how some of his best-known investments came about in the first place. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: Access Industries just partnered with hotelier Alan Faena to open Faena NYC. Tell us about it. 

Jonah Sonnenborn: Faena is part of a mixed-use, full-block project known as One Highline that we acquired at the end of 2021. If you know the storied history of the site, I think it’s emblematic of other transactions Access has been involved in. 

In 2015, [HFZ Capital’s] Ziel Feldman acquired it for $892 million, around $1,200 a foot. At the time, it was a record-breaking transaction per square foot for land. We had looked at the site, and couldn’t get to half that number, but we always thought it would be great for a mixed-use project of consequence, and, since we own the Faena brand, we always thought it could have been a great location for a Faena. Those dreams were deferred for a little while, but eventually we acquired the whole site at the end of `21. 

It’s 235 apartments, the hotel is now 120 keys, and we think it’s absolutely spectacular. If you’ve been to our Faena hotel in Miami, it totally transformed that area of Miami Beach, and we think the project in Chelsea is also going to transform that area from a hospitality perspective.

We created a mini district within Faena Hotel Miami Beach where people can shop, they can stay, they can eat. Obviously, that’s harder to do in Manhattan, but it was something that was really important to us. We ideally wanted to be on the waterfront because the property in Miami is on the waterfront, as is the first Faena in Buenos Aires. 

So, we were looking for a location in New York that was also on the waterfront, and we found it in Chelsea. I think it’s the perfect location because there aren’t a lot of other hospitality offerings in that direct area. Interestingly, I was involved in building the Standard Hotel in 2009 on the High Line with André Balazs, and I think this hotel only improves upon it. 

Let’s rewind to the One Highline acquisition in 2021. What brought it to fruition?

One Highline was a big distressed deal coming out of COVID. The deal was actually distressed pre-COVID, and a number of groups were looking at the transaction, but most weren’t looking at still having a hotel there. We knew that the way that it had been built by Suffolk Construction and HFZ, that there were lower ceiling heights in the eastern building, and if you were to make it all condos — which some of the developers wanted to do — you would have had this mixed product. 

For us, we ultimately saw this as a significantly distressed deal. Ziel bought it for $892 million. We were buying the same site with a 70 percent-built building for $900 million. So the implicit value was significant enough for us to step in. It was a multiple billions of dollars project that we were buying at a discount. As a result, we knew that if we finished the product and delivered high-end quality residential plus a hotel, we were going to create a lot of value in the process. 

Witkoff is your partner in this deal and in others today. How far back does that relationship go?

I’ve known Steve Witkoff and Scott Alper for 20-plus years. We had never worked with them until the One Highline transaction, but, more recently, we found another distressed situation, which was a mixed-use resort project in West Palm Beach called Banyan Cay. It was developed by a gentleman by the name of Domenic Gatto, but he was indicted for health care fraud and his lenders shut him off. 

It was another interesting transaction. We knew that South Florida was pretty hot and golf was on the upswing, no pun intended. So, we were looking at the opportunity and at maybe buying it for a discount from his equity. Then Gatto put his various loans into bankruptcy and there was a bankruptcy auction. Another group — the prevailing group in that auction — happened to be someone I knew, and they called me up and said, “Hey, I’d like you to be my partner.” 

And I said, “Listen, we’ve looked at this deal, we’ve studied it pretty closely, and we’re not comfortable with it.” He goes, “I don’t understand?” I said, “Well, you’re overpaying.” And he said, “I heard you were going to pay more?!” And I said, “Well, if I had wanted to win the deal and pay more, I would have paid more.” He said, ‘“Can you at least give me some ideas ?” And I said, “Well, listen, it’s obviously not in my best interest, but, OK, sure, I’ll give you a flavor.”

This other group ultimately dropped the contract and we ended up buying it from the lender as the credit bidder, and brought Witkoff in to do the golf because they’ve been so successful at Shell Bay, which is a Miami project where they’ve really hit it out of the park in terms of the performance on the golf side. We had to finish the hotel, which is now complete and open. It’s called the Belgrove,150 keys. The golf course, Dutchman’s Pipe, is fantastic. We also have residential that we’re going to develop, and it’s a really nifty, mixed-use project. 

Speaking of Miami, when are the Aman Residences scheduled to open? 

In `27 or `28. There is actually a funny backstory in how I got to know the Aman people — want to hear it?

Yes, please.

So, you’re sitting looking at the New York Aman right behind us, right? Access, when I joined, was the 19th-, 20th- and 21st-floor tenant in that building, and, I always thought, “Man, this could be a neat building for us to own, given the type of real estate that we’re investing in,” and in the small, little world of everything real estate, I played tennis growing up with someone from one of the owners’ families. 

I called him up and said, “Hey, I’d love to get some information on the building because we might be interested in it.” So he sent me a rent roll, we did some analysis, and we offered what I thought was a very attractive number for the building. He said, “That’s great, we own it with another family, the Spitzers, so let me confer with them and see if the offer is acceptable.” He called me back two weeks later and said: “I’m very thankful and grateful for your offer but Doug Harmon and Adam Spies tell me that I can get over $1 billion dollars for this building.”

Now, this was 2014, and I said, “That’s great! I’m so happy for you,” but I’m thinking to myself, that’s like a 3 percent cap, and no way. But then GGP and Jeff Sutton and Michael Shvo came in and bought it for $1.75 billion — which was a billion dollars more than I’d offered. 

The interesting part was there were a few of us tenants who had long-term leases, so they had to negotiate us out. Ultimately, there was a changing of the guard with Michael Shvo and they brought in Vlad Doronin [CEO of Aman Resorts], but we ultimately negotiated a buyout for our space, which took care of the space we’re currently sitting in. It also allowed me to forge a relationship with Vlad and Fran Scola [chief investment officer of Aman] and their team, which led to them becoming, ultimately, the developer of the Aman residences and Aman hotel next to the Faena in Miami.

The Aman Residences were presold and are completely sold out. Who’s a typical buyer? 

It’s almost entirely U.S. buyers, but from a diverse set of locations, including the Northeast, Texas and California. At the end of the day, a number of the buyers have wanted to combine units and it’s an interesting trend, because with Faena we had more international buyers. 

The Aman has such a following among its clientele, and it’s so prestigious, it’s so luxury-minded, that people said to themselves, “There’s 20-odd units and I have to have one.” People were willing to move heaven and earth to get their hands on one.

In Brooklyn, you’re partnering with Naftali Group on Williamsburg Wharf. How did that deal come about? 

That was a deal that a lot of people looked at but couldn’t understand, because there was something called “letters patent” on the land. There was a public trust doctrine for land that had formerly been underwater, and the state had a right of first offer to purchase the land. Before you could actually move forward, you had to terminate those rights and do certain things. So, long story short, it was a complex transaction, but now we’re building five towers over there and, again, the big theme is waterfront, irreplaceable real estate. 

I’ve known Miki [Naftali] since he was at Elad Group. Coming out of the GFC, I was looking at a deal with him and his then-partner, Victor Sigoura in Park Slope. It was a similar time, in some ways, to now, where people were a little bit trigger shy. We spent a lot of time on the deal, and ended up going to the investment committee at my former firm. A decision was made not to go forward, but I always kept in touch with Miki and I was always impressed with his ability to time the market. 

When Miki approached us with this Williamsburg deal, we’d just come off looking at the ABC deal on the Upper West Side, which Silverstein ultimately did, then Extell bought. We’d spent a lot of time getting to know the market, but then we looked at Williamsburg Wharf, and we were like, “This is a fraction of the cost basis and the market is really strong over there. There’s tremendous demand, not a lot of supply,” and you could believe your numbers would work at a much more affordable level [in Williamsburg]. So when Miki decided this was the right structure, we jumped on it. 

Are you finding good opportunities to invest today, given that we’re still in a state of flux in the market between interest rates and overall uncertainty around tariffs?

Our investment philosophy is we’re different than a lot of other sources of capital. When we look at a transaction, we’re asking, “Why should we win this deal? What makes us a better owner?” And, usually, it has to do with either scale or size, speed or the complexity of the deal, like with One Highline. Our competitive advantage as a capital base — duration — gives us an additional advantage, because unlike a closed-end fund vehicle, we have infinite time to see the fruits of our labor come to bear, in the sense that if the markets align and we hit it out of the park quickly and decide that there’s an asset that we do want to trade versus hold forever, we can sell it at the right time. 

If it’s a deal that we think is only going to continue to appreciate and is a “one of one” property like our Grand Hotel de Cap Ferrat in the South of France, or the Ocean Club in the Bahamas, or the Sunset Tower [in L.A.] or the Faenas, we don’t ever have to sell them. So, we have the special ability or superpower to look at things through that lens, versus feeling like, “Oh my god, if we don’t perform in this very short period of time..!” like most opportunity funds do, or hedge funds need to. 

You have a life sciences property in New Jersey, the Northeast Science & Technology Center. How’s that going?

It’s an interesting story. We acquired NEST Center, which was Merck’s former corporate headquarters. We have two great partners there, Onyx and Machine Investment Group, and we acquired the asset for a very low basis, much lower than what Merck had invested into the headquarters because Merck was in a dilemma. They had two headquarters in New Jersey, and one was on a brownfield site, so they couldn’t sell it, and so they decided to move everyone from the non-brownfield site to the brownfield site and consolidated their corporate base there. They then put up for sale the deal in Kenilworth. We acquired it at a very low basis, around $100 a foot. I think they had something like $700 a foot-plus in the property, which is 2 million square feet, and the plan was to re-tenant it as Merck was leaving to new life science tenants. 

As you’re well aware, the life science industry has had some fits and starts, and it’s been a challenging space, both from a new supply perspective as well as the growth of the overall industry. However, you also know the adage of “Better to be lucky than smart,” and Onyx learned that we had a power source on the property. So we were able to devise a plan where we could have a pretty significant data center on the site, and we recently sold that data center to CoreWeave for $322 million. 

That was a fun deal in terms of it not necessarily being what we thought it was going to initially be, but we still own about 1.3 million square feet, and we’re leasing that up to life science and other tenants. 

Where did you grow up? 

I grew up in Westchester. I’m one of three boys, my mom was a teacher and my father was a lawyer. He started out as an antitrust attorney then moved into real estate, so that was one of my earlier experiences, but I had some other family in real estate. That was always influential in terms of me going up on a building hoist and seeing something being created. I always thought that was a pretty awesome job. 

You have a law background, too. Did you have an idea what your career might look like when you were a teenager? 

I really wanted to play shortstop for the Yankees, but that obviously didn’t work out. 

I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I worked in investment banks, and had an experience at Morgan Stanley where, interestingly, I slotted into the real estate group. This was in the late `90s, and the capital markets really were not evolved to allow for the type of transactions that we certainly see today. I was working in the investment bank, then I moved over to Goldman Sachs and had an incredible experience working in the M&A group there with some fabulous mentors, and was on the cusp of thinking about moving to London to work as an associate there when the tech wreck happened in 2001. 

I had already deferred going to law school, and decided that it was probably a good time to go back to school because the economy felt like it was in tatters. I then did a JD/MBA, which was a great experience and met a lot of wonderful people. 

I didn’t think I was going to necessarily be in this particular trajectory, even though it was somewhat in my blood. When I left law and business school, I was applying to a lot of private equity firms, and a few former Goldman Sachs partners were spinning out at the time, led by Steve Mnuchin. They were creating a vehicle within Soros Fund Management. I went to work for them as their third or fourth employee, and that was the birth of Dune Capital — which was a great experience, until Len found me. 

When did Len find you? 

2013. 

How did he find you?

I was, for better or for worse, tasked with working on a lot of our workouts at Dune. So, even though my role at that point had evolved to being integral in terms of sourcing new transactions, I also, whether it’s because of my legal background or the complexity of the transactions, was working out a lot of the difficult deals that Dune found itself in. 

One of the attorneys on a transaction called me one day and said, “Hey, would you be interested in meeting Len Blavatnik?” And I said, ‘“Who is he?” And they’re like, “Well, look him up in Forbes. He’s a pretty significant person.” I looked Len up and thought you probably don’t turn down opportunities to meet with someone like that, because who knows where it will go. And, I met Len at his house.

We had a really nice chat, and Len said, “I’d like you to meet one other guy,” and [Access Industries CEO] Lincoln Benet appeared. I met with Lincoln for half an hour, he and Len went away and came back after talking for a bit, and Len said, “I think you would be a good fit here. Are you interested in a job?” I was like, “I thought it was more of a meet and greet” [laughs].  They said, “Why don’t you think about it and come back to us.” So I went home, and my wife’s like, “How did it go?” I said, ‘“I think I have a new job.”

I think it’s a testament to Len’s instincts and trust, and I’ve been really fortunate to work for him over the last dozen years in terms of building this business but also in him giving me the discretion and the trust I really value. To be, at the time, 36 years old, and be given that type of responsibility, it’s been awesome.

What was your first deal for Access? 

The first deal I did was the Ocean Club, which is this beautiful property on the best beach in the Caribbean. It’s totally picturesque. Imagine that romantic-walk-on-the-beach kind of experience. 

Ocean Club was part of the Atlantis complex that Kerzner had built, and in the small world of things, Merv Griffin had owned it, and Donald Trump, for a hot second, had also owned it. It was a place where they had filmed James Bond movies, The Beatles had been there, and I knew this property, the Ocean Club, was the jewel of the Atlantis complex. Atlantis had gone through bankruptcy after a big leveraged buyout where Brookfield took certain assets, and so it remained highly levered from 2013 into 2014. We were asked to provide a sliver of capital that would help Brookfield refinance the entire transaction. 

I looked at the deal, and called up Andrea Balkan, who at the time was running Brookfield’s debt business. I said, “Andrea, I’m not really in the business of providing higher octane debt. It’s not great for us for a variety of reasons, but I’d like to own the Ocean Club.” And she said, “OK, can I sell you the golf course at the same time?” 

So we ended up doing sort of a debt for equity swap where we ended up taking over the asset. It was really undermanaged and was probably doing around $7 million to $8 million in net operating income. With some management reorganization, we brought in Four Seasons to manage it, instead of One and Only. And today it’s doing mid-$20 millions in terms of NOI, so we basically tripled the bottom line. 

And I think that’s, again, sort of the type of transaction that we’re looking for. Sometimes it’s that distressed owner, and other times it’s great real estate, but it’s just not being managed in the way that sort of optimizes performance. So I think, you know, that’s where me and my team come in, and we say, “Look, we think we can do better and add a lot of value.” 

What do you do for fun? 

I have three kids, and I love spending time with them and my wife. We take such pride in what they do and watching them grow. My daughter just made the varsity tennis team. I was a big tennis player through college and seeing her have that achievement, it’s been amazing. My middle daughter is a singer and tap dancer, a real entertainer. And my son loves every sport. So he’s a great sidekick. Whether it’s playing baseball, tennis or golf, I always know that I have someone who wants to do something with me [laughs].

Cathy Cunningham can be reached at ccunningham@commercialobserver.com.