Harrison Sitomer’s 10-Year Rise From Intern to Chief Investment Officer

Harrison Sitomer, SL Green Realty’s chief investment officer, grew up on the East Side by Second Avenue, on pre-Billionaires’ Row 57th Street, long before the arrival of skinny, cloud-piercing towers full of vacant units owned by absent tycoons.

Sitomer, 35, is a devoted New Yorker, making it all the less surprising that he has spent his entire career at a firm with a massive portfolio almost solely focused on office space in New York City — or, if you want to target it more precisely, Midtown East. 

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SL Green is a fully integrated real estate investment trust (REIT) with interests in 53 buildings totaling 30.7 million square feet, per the company’s website, and investments in excess of 126 million square feet of New York City real estate over the course of its history, according to Sitomer.

Sitting with Sitomer in the conference room of the company’s majestic 5-year-old tower at One Vanderbilt — a space with such expansive views of the city that it offers a viewing platform, Summit, on par with that of the Empire State Building — it’s clear that SL Green’s extreme New York focus is not incidental to his success.

“For me to be part of an organization where the entire fabric of the company is ingrained in New York City is meaningful,” said Sitomer. “My family lives here. My children live here. My parents are still here. To be part of a company that has such a big impact on friends and family and the evolution of New York City drives me to do a lot of what I do every day.”

Today, Sitomer lives in Tribeca with Charlotte, his wife of three years, and their son and daughter, ages 3 and 1, respectively. Growing up, he was greatly inspired by his father, Kenneth Sitomer, who served as CEO of several companies, including Bidermann Industries and Russ Togs.

“My dad was in the retail business. He was the hardest-working man. He’s in his late 70s and still goes to the office five days a week. He does some consulting,” said Sitomer. “He’s at the gym at 4:30, 5 in the morning. He’s a good, honest man who’s very focused on his reputation and honor. So I grew up with that mindset.”

Sitomer said that, for reasons he never learned, his father nudged him away from retail and advised him to go into real estate instead.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. During his junior year of college, after an internship with a small real estate company called Capital Properties, Sitomer realized he wanted a bigger opportunity. He was hired as an SL Green intern in the summer of 2011 by Brett Herschenfeld, now the company’s executive vice president for retail and opportunistic investments, and was thrown head-first into numerous aspects of commercial real estate.

“We have a great internship program. I think it’s the best in the city to this day,” said Sitomer. 

After an immersive and participatory education, every SL Green intern ends the 10-week program by going in front of the company’s investment committee and presenting a case study of a specific building’s return potential.   

While Sitomer said he jokes with today’s interns that he’s not sure how good his own presentation was, it did get him hired as an analyst for the company’s investment group.

From there, Sitomer’s rise was impressive: from intern/new analyst to SL Green’s chief investment officer in 10 years, with stops as associate, vice president and senior vice president along the way.

“It was a fun 10 years. I worked really hard,” said Sitomer, with what seemed like casual understatement.

Asked how he made such an impressive wunderkind rise, he places much of the credit on SL Green’s close-knit team environment.

“There’s a lot of really good guidance here — this place is special,” said Sitomer, who particularly credits Herschenfeld, former company president Andrew Mathias, and SL Green Chairman and CEO Marc Holliday with helping guide his path. “These are the best deal-makers in the city. It was awesome to watch Brett negotiate deals and transact. I spent a lot of time with him in my first few years here seeing how he put deals together. Those resources were all available to me — they were available to everybody — and I just really tapped into them. I learned so much from all of those people.”

Holliday returns the praise.

“We pride ourselves on our homegrown talent at SL Green, but no one has had a more meteoric rise than Harry climbing from intern to the C-suite in barely a decade,” Holliday said in a statement to Commercial Observer. “Anyone who has worked with Harry knows that he brings a truly rare combination of extraordinary skill, exceptional work ethic, and unique ability to connect with people. He has become an unrelenting advocate for New York City, and his work, alongside the rest of our leadership team, has helped to build an unparalleled portfolio, while ensuring strong returns for our shareholders.”

The combination of Sitomer’s deep immersion in all things New York City and the master class he’s received throughout the years at SL Green became the ultimate education for a person charged with deciding how to invest billions of dollars into this very city. 

“The current portfolio is about 30 million square feet and I was involved in much of that at some stage or another of my career, whether acquiring, refinancing, recapitalizing, or bringing in joint venture partners,” said Sitomer. “But there’s really a team effort here.”

The strength of that team is reflected in the company’s success, and Sitomer said that the blend of deep knowledge with a group of people who’ve been together for decades — much of SL Green’s C-suite has been with the company for over 20 years — makes their investing expertise in New York City some of the deepest and most well-researched in the industry.

“We’ve invested in over 126 million square feet of a 400 million-square-foot market,” said Sitomer. “We’ve probably evaluated and underwritten around another 125 million square feet that for one reason or another we did not invest in. That’s a huge competitive advantage for us.”

SL Green has another advantage that might be unique among its New York cohorts.  

“Everything we do is within walking or subway distance of where we’re sitting right at this moment,” Sitomer said of the company’s portfolio. “So we have this advantage when we’re evaluating opportunities. If a deal comes in on Monday morning, we can be there in 10 minutes.”

Considering that most CRE ownership firms take on investments outside their home base, the competitive advantage for SL Green is considerable.  

“A lot of firms invest in 15, 20, 25 cities. It’s not so easy to do,” said Sitomer. “They’re working on one deal in New York, another in Denver, and then they have to look at one in Los Angeles and it takes four or five days to get out there. By that point, we’ve already underwritten the deal and issued a term sheet, and we’re ready to go on the documents. That type of efficiency is how we run our process here.”

Sitomer’s investment team meets every Monday morning to review potential opportunities in what Sitomer describes as a regimented process. Each investment team member is assigned to specific brokers, sponsors or sellers throughout the city, leaving one specific team member responsible for any type of transaction that might arise.

“If Newmark is bringing a deal to market, Scott Kocis on my team is responsible for anything Newmark,” said Sitomer. “If there’s an investor in Asia that wants to sell a loan, Young Hahn in our office, who spends a lot of his time in Asia, is responsible for making sure he knows everyone in that market and is building those relationships.”

At these Monday meetings, the full team discusses which opportunities to greenlight and take to the underwriting stage, and which ones might be tracked merely for comps. Greenlighted deals make their way to Holliday for a final determination on how to proceed.  

As a fully integrated REIT, SL Green handles virtually every possible function within commercial real estate, including operations, construction, leasing and property management, Sitomer said. This provides insight that often predates that of less multi-dimensional competitors.

“We see data six to nine months ahead of the rest of the market,” said Sitomer, who emphasizes the long tenures of SL Green’s executives as a distinct advantage.

“Steve Durels and his leasing team have all been here for 25, 26, 27 years or so,” Sitomer said of the company’s executive vice president and director of leasing and real property. “A lot of our investment focus is driven by them and what they’re seeing in the market day in and day out.”

Sitomer spends many hours with Durels and his team as they assist him in understanding where tenants want to be and, just as importantly, which neighborhoods or business districts might be falling out of favor.

“When people read something in a Cushman & Wakefield or CBRE report, that’s usually months after the transaction was in a term sheet,” said Sitomer. “By the time it reaches the press or a market report, that’s six to nine months behind when we’re seeing it.”

The company’s comprehensive immersion in just one market — a 3D map of all the company’s investments shows basically a Midtown East cluster — allows for a depth of market knowledge that can be hard to match, an obvious advantage when evaluating potential investments.

Sitomer uses the example of how, in 2022, Durels and his team began to notice a rapid rise in tenants seeking to be in and around Park Avenue, especially financial services firms. This became a significant driver for SL Green’s investment decisions around that time.

“We started to buy Park Avenue,” said Sitomer. “We bought 450 Park, 245 Park, and 500 Park. We bought a partner’s interest in 100 Park, and we bought 10 East 53rd Street, which is a little bit off Park. That was all because of what we heard from Steve, and our team was hearing it before everyone else in the market. We moved quickly.”

As Sitomer describes it, the team at SL Green can both understand and absorb current market dynamics and react to them with a literal sense of immediacy.

“Our leadership team is all here, so we can just go out and see what’s going on,” said Sitomer. “If we’re hearing rumblings that there are issues in Lower Manhattan, we’ll go walk around for an hour or two. We can make decisions very quickly.”

This proximity and the company’s deep bench has yielded results in countless ways, most recently as SL Green announced on July 17 that it has surpassed $1 billion raised for its SL Green Opportunistic Debt Fund.

According to the company, the fund is “focused on capitalizing on the dislocation between rapidly improving leasing fundamentals and the early stages of improving debt capital markets,” and targets “high-quality assets in New York City, where traditional financing remains constrained, delivering flexible capital solutions to both borrowers and lenders.”

The fund arose from discussions between Sitomer and Holliday at the end of 2023 about the despair of the office sector during the COVID era. How could the company come out of it prospering despite the sense that some were hoping to witness a great fall?

“We came out having completed $10 billion of office sales [since COVID],” said Sitomer. “We repositioned our balance sheet and really put ourselves in a strong financial position. And, most important, we came through that reputationally, because everyone wanted to see us fail. You had people that just loved the headlines [about the office market], including short sellers and competitors. Everyone loves these splashy things. Forget financial papers, you’d go to TMZ and they’d be like, ‘Office buildings in New York in distress!’ 

“It was like an attack,” he added. “It didn’t even feel like a financial issue. It felt almost like everyone wanted office to go down. They were looking for that black swan event. And who better to look at than the [biggest] New York City office landlord at the time?”

By working closely with its lenders, partners and tenants, SL Green found equilibrium from COVID’s office doldrums by the start of 2024, as market fundamentals began to improve and occupancy in the company’s portfolio rose. 

Sitomer said 2024 was the company’s “biggest leasing year by volume since 2013,” leaving SL Green feeling very positive about the market. Between the strength of its balance sheet, a collection of solid joint venture partners, and a growing asset management business, the time seemed right to pursue the fund, which felt to Sitomer and Holliday like the best way to derive value from SL Green’s platform.

“We didn’t want to issue stock. At certain stock prices, it doesn’t make sense to dilute the shareholder base,” said Sitomer. “Joint venture equity is great, and partners are great, but it takes time to raise partner capital on a specific deal, and deals move fast. So we said, ‘The way to really grow our asset management business, which is managing capital on behalf of third parties, is to go into the fund business.’ ”

Extensive discussions led to the conclusion that opportunistic credit presented the best fund opportunity, and the goal became to “invest at the intersection between fundamentally performing real estate and credit dislocation,” according to Sitomer.

“We’re not trying to be pioneering,” said Sitomer. “I’m not looking to do deals on sites outside of our core competency. ‘Opportunistic’ may mean doing things that blow my mind to some people, and I wish those people luck. But, for us, it’s about finding arbitrage and opportunity in the market. That’s what we set out to do.”

One source of pride for Sitomer is that many of the funds’ major investments came from previous or ongoing SL Green partners.

“Seventy-five or 80 percent of the fund’s investors are existing partners of SL Green in some way,” said Sitomer. “We have partners from domestic insurance companies and pension plans, plus investors from Canada, Asia and the Middle East, including Asian pensions and life insurance companies.”

Sitomer noted that even with existing partners, raising this type of capital presents numerous challenges, including heavy due diligence. SL Green’s reputation showed itself to be its greatest asset.

“What this experience illuminated for me was that it’s a lot of work to raise your first fund. It takes a lot of time. SEC-registered public companies put you through the grind,” said Sitomer. “Track record and reputation are so important.”

With so much invested in New York both business-wise and emotionally, Sitomer wanted to give back when the city hit one of its lowest points. This led him, Holliday and a few others — including chef Daniel Boulud, who has collaborated with SL Green on ventures at properties including One Vanderbilt and One Madison — to create a resource for combating food insecurity in New York City. 

“I had so many friends that had family who were sick, or restaurants they owned being shut down. Tenants in our portfolio weren’t able to pay rent and survive,” said Sitomer. “Marc and I started thinking about finding a way to serve. There was so much food needed, and also so many restaurants that were shut down. So our goal was, let’s help both.”

This led to the formation of Food1st (pronounced “Food First”), a nonprofit that delivers meals from New York City restaurants to first responders and those suffering from food insecurity. 

Kicked off with a $1 million donation from SL Green and the culinary skills of Boulud, the program has since raised over $10 million and enlisted more than 50 restaurants to assist the effort. Food1st now donates roughly 75,000 meals to vulnerable New Yorkers every year.

“The goal was, let’s create our own distribution program,” said Sitomer. “We activated 35 restaurants and raised money from the real estate community to pump into those restaurants, and we’re at over a million meals delivered and we’re still delivering. Last year we did probably close to 60,000 meals. This year, we’ll probably deliver close to about 75,000. We’re just going to keep going.”

SL Green’s New York orientation suggests another way the company is deeply different from much of the industry. As the city endured the results of COVID, there was never any mention of heading, or investing, south or west.

“There was a lot of time in 2020 and 2021 when people said, ‘Go to Miami, invest in Texas.’ And we stayed disciplined,” said Sitomer. “We stuck to what we know. We stuck to the city. And now, sitting where we sit, that was the right bet.”

One clear takeaway from all this is that whatever people say in passing about New York City’s current status, investment dollars show that the world, SL Green and Sitomer are as bullish on the city as ever.

“We raised over $500 million in the past 10 days — that’s a lot of money to raise from a lot of different investors in a 10-day period,” said Sitomer. “They’re optimistic. They see the opportunity. They believe in the future of New York.”

Larry Getlen can be reached at lgetlen@commercialobserver.com.