Joseph Chetrit. Photo: Ryan McCune/PatrickMcMullan.com
Joseph Chetrit and Isaac Chetrit
Co-founder; co-founder at Chetrit Group; AB & Sons
In May 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged New York City, Joseph Chetrit closed on the nearly $25 million sale of a townhouse he owned at 118 East 76th Street in Manhattan. The trade of the eight-bedroom, 32-foot-wide house was the largest residential sale in the five boroughs during the pandemic to that point.
The deal underscored the might of the seller. Chetrit remains, even through the pandemic’s tumult, one of the biggest private players in the city’s real estate scene. Deals were very few and far between during the past year or so — but we found no indication that Chetrit didn’t keep his empire of residential, office and retail properties intact and ready for what’s sure to be a post-pandemic boom. (The famously demur Chetrit could not be reached for comment.)
Chetrit owns and runs the Chetrit Group with family that includes brothers Meyer, Jacob and Juda. The company controls the hotel-condo hybrid 500 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the mixed-use building 545 West 37th Street in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. In the Financial District, it owns 1 Whitehall Street (home of Observer Media) and 65 Broadway — aka the American Express Building.
If Joseph Chetrit laid relatively low during the pandemic, his cousin Isaac Chetrit was more out there.
The co-founder and driving force of AB & Sons — he runs it with brother Eli Chetrit and son Abraham Chetrit — capitalized on the recovery of the coworking sector by turning over in spring 2021 his 60,000-square-foot Midtown building at 315 West 35th Street to Workville, a flex space operator Isaac Chetrit co-owns. About a year before that, in May 2020, Chetrit bought with the Aini family a development site with 150,000 square feet of buildable potential at 620 West 153rd Street in Manhattan’s Hamilton Heights.
AB & Sons owned at least two dozen properties citywide in 2017, according to The Real Deal, with the count appearing to grow during the pandemic. And, perhaps ripping a page from his cousin Joseph’s playbook, Isaac Chetrit could not be reached for this article.
