GFP Real Estate Creates New Development Entity, Names Brian Steinwurtzel CEO

GFP Real Estate is breaking away from the development portion of its company, Commercial Observer has learned.

The family firm led by Jeff Gural is creating an entirely new entity, GFP Development, which will be led by his nephew Brian Steinwurtzel as CEO. The new entity will focus solely on development projects and opportunities in New York City and Jersey City, N.J.

Steinwurtzel has been in charge of GFP Real Estate’s development efforts for some time now, executing plans for buildings such as 100 Gold Street, 25 Water Street and 222 Broadway, some of the most high-profile office-to-residential conversions in Manhattan.

Now, he will have a little more freedom to move, the two executives told CO.

“Our teams that work on [office leasing] are focused on our tenants and making their employees’ experience as good as possible,” Steinwurtzel said. “There’s almost a completely different team focused on acquiring these larger projects, designing and building them. While we’re all part of the Gural family, we’re all just really focused on two different tasks, even though it is within real estate.

“Our plan is to continue to win business,” Steinwurtzel added. “Our team has grown each year over the last five-plus years, and our investors continue to be extremely happy with the returns that we’re delivering to them.”

Steinwurtzel says the new organization will be “agnostic” in its approach to assets, as it has been in the past under his management involving office developments, life sciences facilities and ground-up residential developments.

Gural said the division of the company was designed in part to clear up any confusion about who is in charge of what the company is building.

“Every time he was doing a deal and I would look in the magazines, it would have my picture and say Jeff Gural’s GFP is doing something,” Gural said. “I just said, ‘This is stupid, we should create a separate entity where people know that it’s Brian and not Jeff Gural, and where people working with him can have a piece of the action.’ … I really want him to get the credit.”

Eric Gural, co-CEO alongside Steinwurtzel, will serve as principal of GFP Real Estate going forward.

For Gural’s part, his hands are full operating or managing what GFP defines as its “legacy portfolio,” a collection of buildings in former manufacturing enclaves such as the Garment District and SoHo. Those properties were acquired either by Jeff Gural’s father Aaron, or by Jeff Gural and his former partner Barry Gosin.

Gural was a founder of Newmark Knight Frank alongside Gosin before Newmark and GFP essentially split in 2017.

Since the pandemic, when the GFP legacy portfolio was left almost barren of tenants, Gural has been keeping himself busy doing deals to backfill space, something he’s been largely successful at.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.