Shlomi Avdoo’s Eponymous Development Firm Leans Into Manhattan

In two decades, Shlomi Avdoo has gone from rehabbing Park Slope-area brownstones and developing small-beans projects in the outer reaches of Queens and Brooklyn to developing design-forward, contextually conscious buildings in collaboration with Architectural Digest 100-level talent. Until now, most of Avdoo’s eponymous development company’s work has been in Brooklyn in particular.

But the firm is leveling up again: With 2 million square feet of residential and mixed-use projects across New York City under its belt and an additional 1 million square feet currently in the pipeline, Avdoo is charging headfirst into the Manhattan market with high-profile, neighborhood-defining condominium developments. 

Take its Upper East Side project slated for East 71st Street and Second Avenue, a Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA)-designed 22-story tower with interiors by AD100 designer Alyssa Kapito poised for delivery in 2028. Or its 400-foot tower planned for King and Varick streets in the emerging and largely low-slung neighborhood of Hudson Square, or a forthcoming project in Chelsea, both of which do not yet have an architect and interior designer attached to them publicly. 

To accommodate this growth, the vertically integrated company plans to almost double its design development side from about 30 people to up to 50 in 2026 and move into a new, larger office. At the helm of this flurry of activity sits Avdoo, the man — a self-described workaholic who wants to deliver buildings as beautiful and unique as they are impactful to their neighborhoods.

“We don’t see ourselves as just a developer, but we see ourselves as a curator, as a storyteller. Every project is a unique story,” the 51-year-old Avdoo said, speaking from his firm’s current Manhattan office on West 37th Street. “It’s almost like every project is a book that’s part of a larger series. And what we’ve learned in the business, and what the business has taught us, is that if you write a great story and they love the book, people are going to want to read the next one.”

Leaps of faith

Shlomi Avdoo is an immigrant New York success story. He and his family moved from Bat Yam, a sea town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel, to Forest Hills, Queens, when Avdoo was 10 years old.

He landed at Queens College where he could be close to his parents, a locksmith and a stay-at-home mom, and still help them with everything they needed, he said. He graduated with an economics degree in 1997 and followed it up with a law degree in 2000 from Touro College. He decided to enroll in law school at the behest of the woman who would later become his sister-in-law, and who had submitted his law school application unbeknownst to him. 

From his late teens to late 20s, Avdoo worked the Manhattan circuit as an event producer. It taught him that leveling up in your career is often staked on who you know and work with. 

Through guys in finance he met while producing events, he got a job as a stockbroker for Wall Street firm GlobeShare, a subsidiary of Laidlaw Global Securities. But it wasn’t for him. He decided to put his law degree to use and opened a practice, Turner & Avdoo Spiegelman & Associates, with his brother-in-law in 2001. The firm focused on real estate transaction law. 

Even still, Avdoo’s heart wasn’t in it. 

“My passion was never in just sitting and reading contracts,” he said. “What I found very exciting was the fact that [real estate] felt like it was fast paced.” 

He liked the aspect of buying and selling, and he wondered why some properties sold so much more quickly than others. This was his light bulb moment: He realized it came down to design.

Avdoo started flipping properties soon after. Using seed money from friends, he purchased a house in Jamaica, Queens, and renovated it himself. It sold quickly and he was on to the next, renovating 20 to 30 homes, all in Queens, he said. Avdoo got to a place where he could start hiring people to help renovate and sell those homes, and then moved into developing one- to three-family projects. Because he didn’t have much capital behind him, it was important that the properties he was developing sold quickly, and that’s where he began to lean on what’s become Avdoo’s calling card: an attention to detail and good design.

Then came 2008. 

Working in finance, Avdoo had learned enough about mortgages to see that the market was about to collapse. He finished and sold all of his properties, but also knew a market correction was an opportunity for him to once again level up. He set his sights on Brooklyn, and opened an office at the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights a week after Lehman Brothers collapsed. It marked the beginning of Avdoo, the development company, in earnest.

Taking flight 

Since its founding in 2008, Avdoo has flourished in its embrace of design. 

“What he wants to do is raise the bar of what new construction represents,” said Kapito, who’s working with Avdoo and RAMSA on the East 71st Street project. New construction has become “like airline travel, where it’s so watered down that the experience is just, like, not great. And he wants to bring it back up again.”

In her experience working with Avdoo, he allows her creative control and a somewhat flexible time frame. “I’ve never been told by another client, ‘Take your time, get it right.’ He has an appreciation for design that’s super rare.”

It helps that the company has the chops to see the details through.

Since its inception, Avdoo has been vertically integrated, meaning everything from design to construction to marketing happens in-house (with outside collaboration from the likes of Kapito). While there are currently about 30 people working on the design development side, Avdoo estimates about 100 people work on its construction side.

“Construction is one of our biggest strengths today,” Avdoo said. “One of the most difficult things for developers is execution and often where developers fail, because they’re not able to execute on schedule and on budget.” When everything happens in-house, he said, things are a lot more seamless.

Avdoo’s Bergen development in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, was designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo with interiors by the borough’s own Workstead. Today the 105-condo development, which launched sales in 2024, is over 80 percent sold.

When Avdoo tapped Escobedo, “she was just an architect in Mexico City” with a “really small city studio,” Avdoo said. 

“Identifying and working with these emerging architects that are super talented, that maybe some developers move away from working with because their studios are too small,” Avdoo said, “for us, that is the opportunity.” In 2022, Escobedo was announced as the architect for the forthcoming Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What Avdoo has learned that what buyers want right now — on top of good, thoughtful and unique design — is outdoor space, exposure to light and air, and privacy. Avdoo’s current project at 110 Boerum Place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, a 21-condo building with architecture and interiors by Brent Buck, will offer just that when it’s complete this year. It hit the market two months ago, Avdoo said, and is over 50 percent sold. The company is also at work on a Gowanus, Brooklyn, rental building, its first rental since 2000, designed by Morris Adjmi. Beyond that, the focus is on Manhattan.

“We have a long history of being patient and building strong relationships to acquire properties in super tight environments,” Avdoo said. “Today, Manhattan is arguably the toughest market for available inventory to build, so working with this pipeline feels especially rewarding.”

Building trust

In Avdoo’s leveling up, it has consistently worked with Valley National Bank to finance its projects. 

“[Shlomi] actually came recommended by someone I knew very well, who asked me a few times to take a risk,” said Christopher Gregg, the bank’s first senior vice president and department head of New York commercial real estate. It’s always a risk working with a new developer, not knowing how honest they are or if they’re capable of executing a project, he said. 

That was over a decade ago.

The risk paid off. Since then, Valley National has worked on a handful of projects with Avdoo, providing an $89 million construction loan for a 100-condo development on St. Marks Place in Brooklyn, a $105 million construction loan for Bergen, a $47 million construction loan for 110 Boerum Place, a $52 million purchase loan for East 71st Street, and supporting the $63 million purchase of 68 King Street. 

Gregg is glad he took his friend’s recommendation. It came from “someone I knew and trusted, and, over time, I’ve built the same relationship with Shlomi.”

Gregg also said Avdoo’s wife, Devora, once told him they calculated how many hours a week he spends on projects, and “basically, she thinks he’s insane. But he loves what he’s doing.”

Outside of work, Avdoo ferries his four children to various activities and sports practices — his youngest, 16-year-old twin boys, are very into tennis, he said — and volunteers with Project Sunshine, a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers into hospitals to play with children with medical needs. The Avdoos live on the south shore of Long Island, but when the twins go off to college, the couple plans to relocate to the East 71st Street project.

Avdoo said he tries to give back not only in his personal life but also in his professional life. For him, the reward is not how much he can make on a project, but creating homes for people in a market that he doesn’t foresee having enough market-rate or affordable units to meet demand anytime soon.

“That is the most rewarding thing,” he said. “That is the driver that makes [me] wake up in the morning.”