Nathan Jaime Marcus, 23
In-house retail leasing representative at Vornado Realty Trust
In August 2022, Nathan Marcus was sitting in orientation at Fordham Law School when he had a revelation: Law was not for him. He’d prefer real estate.
“I realized I liked law,” Marcus said. “But I know I’m not passionate about this.”
The seed had been planted a year earlier, when the Deal, N.J., native had interned with Vornado. Here was something he was passionate about. He was balancing the internship with school, LSATs and law school applications, but something at Vornado appealed to Marcus’s enterprising spirit. In real estate he would have the chance to work with industry heavyweights like Ed Hogan, Haim Chera, Jason Morrison and Jenniel Davis — and that’s exactly what he did and who he’s been working with.
Since joining Vornado’s retail team full time, along with tenanting some of the REIT’s iconic addresses on Fifth Avenue and the Bow Tie, Marcus’s main focus has been Penn 1, Penn 2 and the Moynihan Train Hall, the retail broker’s equivalent of getting in on the California gold rush. The food and beverage brands that the team has nabbed have included respected city brands such as Jacob’s Pickles and sushi spot BondSt, as well as the national big boys like Chick-fil-A, Shake Shack and (of course) Starbucks.
Marcus and team have also been trying to fill the half-dozen or so remaining spaces with services like nail salons, bubble tea purveyors, barber shops and even meditation spas.
It remains amazing that Marcus has risen to a role at such a prominent real estate firm so quickly. In his first year on the job, he adopted a philosophy of “scour every block of the city” to get an idea of where retail tenants were opening and what brands were most interesting. It’s the credo of someone who hustles.
Indeed, well before college at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business and his internship at Vornado, Marcus had started his own company, NJM, which started as a small local sports club. A year later there were 150 kids in the “NJM League,” which ultimately developed into a summer day camp of 500 by the time COVID hit. Of course, NJM stands for Nathan Jaime Marcus. We expect Marcus will do extremely well in real estate.
