Bill Rudin

It was a year of coming full circle for Bill Rudin.

The co-chairman and CEO of Rudin Management Company wrapped his three-year tenure as chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York in 2020. He shepherded the powerful trade group through a rocky political time for real estate in New York, never mind through the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also used his chairmanship to champion both diversity and innovation within the industry.

It was under Rudin that the group launched a diversity committee and began to diversify its own ranks, and commit more deeply to equity within the industry. “If you walk the halls of REBNY today, it feels like the city as we know it,” veteran broker Mary Ann Tighe previously told CO in regard to Rudin’s tenure. “And, by that, I mean both gender and racial diversity, and just openness to people from all throughout the city.”

On the company side, Rudin Management sold the first property it ever developed, back in 1925, the same year that the company was founded, though the family had owned property for a generation at that point. The 54-unit residential property in the Bronx, at 1400 Benson Street, traded for $11 million in December. It had been a lumber yard that Rudin’s grandfather, Samuel Rudin, would pass every day during his commute to work.

As of this year, Rudin’s portfolio included 4.7 million square feet of residential space in Manhattan, and 10.5 million square feet of offices. While family-run firms are better situated than other real estate ownership companies, Rudin is (like everybody else) still exposed to the uncertainty in Manhattan’s office market, which remains largely vacant more than a year into the pandemic. Nevertheless, Rudin closed on several leases and financings over the last year: Blackstone Company expanded at 345 Park Avenue, taking an additional 80,000 square feet, while Gannett Co. took just shy of 25,000 square feet at 1675 Broadway.

Dock 72, the company’s WeWork-anchored development on the Brooklyn waterfront, like so many projects from different developers, remains somewhat of a challenge amid a Brooklyn commercial market struggling more than Manhattan’s. But Rudin has been developing for almost 100 years. They know what they’re doing.—C.G.