Gary Barnett Is Suddenly Very Busy in Manhattan

If anybody thought developer Gary Barnett was done planting megaprojects in New York City, this year has proved them very wrong.

After a few, in his words, “eh” years, Barnett’s Extell Development came roaring back the past year with nary a week passing without at least some news of a project hitting the press.

There’s the 600-foot-tall office building expected to cost more than $1 billion underway at 570 Fifth Avenue, on which Extell partnered with Ikea parent Ingka Investments. It will have an 80,000-square-foot Ikea store at the base.

Then there’s the proposed 1,200-foot residential tower at the former ABC campus at 77 West 66th Street on the Upper West Side, which would dwarf the two tallest buildings in the neighborhood. That project is near Extell’s 70-story condominium at 50 West 66th Street. It’s nearing completion, and a unit on the 47th floor sold for $47 million in October, the priciest sale in the neighborhood so far this year.

Can’t forget the 71-story mixed-use tower planned at the former Wellington Hotel at 871 Seventh Avenue, or the 1,162-foot-tall residential tower at 655 Madison Avenue (where Chanel is in talks to buy the retail space for around $450 million).

And that’s not to mention a Four Seasons-branded condo project in Park City, Utah, and a large development in Israel.

“We are kind of a very deliberate company, in a way, so it takes time for us to accumulate sites, plan them,” Barnett told Commercial Observer. “Things have come together in a good way.”

To help fund all of this, Extell found an unnamed hedge fund partner in September that will pump $1.2 billion to back nine Extell properties, including the ABC campus redevelopment, Bisnow reported.

Plus, there’s all the properties Extell has been unloading recently, including the September 2024 sale of the development site at 180 East 125th Street for about $70 million and the retail condominium at 171 West 57th Street, which it sold for $25 million in February.

“We decided to sell projects that are not strategic,” Barnett said. “They’re good projects, but they’re maybe not large enough or they’re not something we think we can maximize the value from. So we’re concentrating really only on the most important projects.”

But all of this is par for the course for anybody who knows Barnett and Extell. Since leaving his job as a diamond dealer in Belgium in the 1990s to step into the world of New York real estate, Barnett has made his mark on the city. He developed major projects, including two far West Side condos called the Rushmore and the Avery, and the W Times Square. Such moves were the prelude for Barnett essentially creating Billionaires’ Row out of thin air (rights) with One57 and Central Park Tower, the world’s tallest residential building.

“Gary and his firm build markets,” said Ryan SERHANT, reality television star and founder and CEO of residential brokerage Serhant, who has worked with Barnett for years on different projects. “They definitely don’t follow trends. I think they create them.”

Throughout all of this, Barnett had to face waves of opposition from fellow New Yorkers, politicians and local groups fighting to stop his massive projects — all while Extell kicked off the pandemic with a $206 million loss, largely from the result of declining property values. Still, it’s never wise to bet against Barnett coming out on top.

“He’s somebody who’s a little bit like Houdini,” said RXR Chairman and CEO Scott Rechler, who provided $463 million in financing for Extell’s One Manhattan Square, 555 10th Avenue and 500 East 14th Street in 2016. “He’ll go into challenging situations, but you count on him to find a way to get through.”

And despite his reputation for massive, glitzy buildings catering to the city’s richest individuals and companies, Barnett himself cuts a very different figure. The 69-year-old Manhattan native and Queens College graduate will show up at the annual Real Estate Board of New York gala in a simple black sweater and sneakers, and he still rocks a flip phone in an age where almost every broker can barely make it through a meeting without checking their smartphone.

“He’s incredibly understated, incredibly focused,” said Serhant. “A lot of people who want to get into real estate development mention him and what he’s been able to do for a long period of time. He’s been through every market cycle. He’s been through the ups, he’s been through the downs, and he stayed consistent. And he still uses a flip phone.”

Despite Serhant — known for his strong social media presence and willingness to have a camera crew follow his every move — being an almost yin to Barnett’s yang, the two have struck up an unlikely bond. 

Serhant’s first-ever deal as a broker came from an Extell building years ago. (He said he was sorely disappointed to learn later that working with other developers was not as easy as working with Extell.) And it came full circle when Serhant struck out on his own to start his namesake brokerage. Barnett gave Serhant’s new company its first assignment: selling the 458 condos in Extell’s Brooklyn Point development. And Extell projects feature heavily in Season 1 of Serhant’s “Owning Manhattan” in 2024 (though Barnett himself never makes an appearance).

“It was hugely important at that time,” Serhant said about the Brooklyn Point assignment. “I was taking this leap to go do something different, by myself, in the middle of COVID, in the shutdown of New York City, and it meant a lot to me that he would do that.”

Barnett’s also known to have an insatiable desire to learn everything he can about the city’s real estate market, said investment sales broker Robert Knakal, founder and chairman of investment sales firm BKREA.

Knakal, who’s worked with Extell on more than two dozen deals, said he’s brought his famed map detailing each parcel in Manhattan below 110th Street to Barnett, who wanted to pore over every deal and potential deal in the market, even if Barnett wasn’t personally involved.

“He’s really a great student of the game,” Knakal said. “He looks for value, he looks for opportunity, he looks for what could be rather than what is. That’s a great quality, because, in New York, we don’t have rolling pastures of land where you can go down the street and build another one — you have to be very creative in how you put these things together.”

And Barnett has no problem playing that long creative game. Barnett spent about 15 years assembling all the pieces for the 570 Fifth development, finally closing on the final holdout, a parcel at 576 Fifth Avenue, in March for $175 million, even as he had a Plan B to carve out the development without it.

“I don’t know of anybody else who is so stupid to take such long views with so much risk and hope that at the end things work out,” Barnett said.

But Barnett’s “stupid” decision to hold out on Fifth seems to be anything but. Ingka reportedly invested between $300 million and $500 million into the project, and Barnett said it plans to open a “store of the future” in the base, unlike anything Ikea has tried in the city before.

Jenna Grader, Ingka’s real estate investment manager, said the retailer had for a while wanted a presence on Fifth Avenue and met with the city’s major players before being introduced to Extell. It was the shared vision and values that made Ingka decide to work with Barnett.

“When it comes to Gary, he has a vision, he dares to do something that other investors don’t, and he does a lot in order to execute his passion,” Grader said. “Unlike some other investors, who sometimes care about only their returns, Gary was truly interested in what we need to be successful.”

Grader said Ikea’s new Fifth Avenue store will be similar to the one it opened in London earlier this year. It’s working with Barnett to “improve that concept” since Ingka is not renovating a historic building in this case, but on constructing a brand-new one.

Aside from locking in Ikea, Extell is reportedly close to finalizing law firm Simpson Thacher as a 700,000-square-foot anchor tenant for the building’s office portion.

“We’ve given them a crazy good deal, to be honest, because it’s very helpful to have them in on board, day one,” Barnett said. “You can design the building to suit them, and it helps with financing.” 

Barnett held onto the parcel during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everybody was writing obituaries about the office and in-person work, but it’s set to come online in 2028 with the office market in a much different place. More and more companies are calling their workers back four or five days a week while demand for top-shelf office space continues growing, even as the city faces a dearth of that inventory.

While Barnett took a long view at Fifth Avenue, his timeline was much, much shorter at the ABC campus. He said it took Extell “10 minutes” to decide to assemble that site, and then the company “aggressively” pursued it.

In 2022, Barnett closed on the $930 million purchase of the ABC campus from Silverstein Properties and family office Seven Valleys, and announced plans in the summer to demolish those properties to make way for the skyscraper.

Like some of Extell’s developments, it has faced opposition from some community groups and residents, including “Who’s the Boss?” and “Taxi” star Tony Danza.

“I don’t understand why the whole neighborhood isn’t out in the streets and furious about it,” Danza told Curbed earlier this year. “It’s going to impact the neighborhood for probably the next four or five years, and then after that it’ll shade the park and be this ugly glass tower.”

Barnett said he has been working with the local community board on the objections and has offered to carve out about 10 percent of the units for affordable housing to curry goodwill, though local politicians are pushing for 30 percent.

Still, Barnett doesn’t seem too bothered about Danza’s opposition, because while he understands the complaints about the height of the project, he thinks it’s overall a net win for the neighborhood.

“There’s always people — and, in this case, very few people — that don’t want any development,” Barnett said. “In my opinion, it’s a very selfish view taken by somebody to say, ‘We don’t want to add much-needed housing, much-needed tax revenue to the city, much-needed jobs. We don’t want to do that, all because you’re blocking my view.’ ”

Barnett has similar feelings about the pushback against his past projects and thinks they’ve all been positive for the city. Still, he’s not looking for a fight when he embarks on a new megadevelopment.

“It’s not fun,” Barnett said. “I don’t look for headaches or opposition or high exposure, but we’re in the city of New York, we do major-sized buildings, and it kind of comes with the territory. In spite of all of that, we’re quite proud of what we’ve added to the city.”

And, as the oncoming Zohran Mamdani administration has many in the real estate community shaking in their Cole Haans, Barnett isn’t joining them.

While he said Mamdani’s public comments have been “risky,” he commended Mamdani’s push to get more housing built and provide more social services. Still, Barnett fears what could happen if Mamdani makes good on some of his goals.

“Every politician makes a lot of promises, and almost none of them keep them all because it’s not realistic,” Barnett said. “It’s never good to talk a radical story, but it depends on what the reality is. … If you say we’re going to tax the rich into extinction or we’re going to raise taxes on existing housing until a level where nobody really wants to carry that burden, then you’re going to kill the golden goose.”

That political change hitting the city adds yet another serving to Barnett’s plate. Those who know him said he can handle it. RXR’s Rechler praised Barnett’s ability to juggle multiple things at once while being able to pivot at a moment’s notice.

“When you do a deal with Gary, you need to be prepared, there’s going to be fluidity,” Rechler said. “There’s not going to be a straight line from Point A to Point B. You’ve got to be working with him to be flexible.”

Even with Barnett’s unassuming, media-shy nature (he’s been called “the Anti-Trump” by New York Magazine for that reason), not being bred in a real estate dynasty (his father was a Talmudic scholar) and reliance on some anachronistic technology, Serhant said Barnett has been able to create a legacy in the city “that stands the test of time.”

“I give him a lot of credit for using that flip phone to develop the most exciting buildings in New York City,” Serhant said.