Jake Elghanayan

Have you refinanced anything in 2022? How difficult/easy was it?

Yes, we’ve refinanced a few multifamily buildings. It was not necessarily difficult, but much more expensive than anticipated due to both higher rates and wider spreads.

There’s a lot of Class B and C office in NYC. If you could lay your hands on them at a really great price, what would you do with them?

Likely convert to residential. Long term, both the office market and the city’s tax base would benefit from converting the least competitive office buildings to residential. There are also strong environmental benefits to be realized from meeting our city’s housing needs via conversions.

What market outside of NYC do you like and why?

I say this from a place of ignorance, but I’ve always been curious about trying to rehabilitate historical parts of the more challenged Northeast cities, like Baltimore.

There’s a midterm election this year. How closely are you following, and do you think the national political climate will have an effect in New York?

I follow it reasonably closely and it will surely impact New York, but I don’t have much confidence in my forecasting ability.

How many days per week are you in the office?

Five most of the year, four during the summer.

How many days per week are your tenants in the office?

For the FIRE [finance, insurance and real estate] industries, typically around four days per week. Tech, media and most of the others seem to be closer to three days per week.

NYC apartment rents have reached never seen levels. How much further can it go? How does the housing squeeze play out?

In my opinion, the right metric is the compound annual growth rate relative to 2019, which is around 3.5 to 4 percent, based on the data I’ve seen. That’s the net result of a dramatic decline in rents from 2020 to 2021, followed by an even more dramatic rebound this past year. The last three years provide the lesson that even NYC apartment rents are guided by supply and demand. With demand having rebounded, the future trend line of rent growth will depend on supply, which I believe will probably be lower over the next five years due to higher interest rates and the loss of 421a.

ESG: fad or fixture?

I applaud the idea that we should each view our investments as needing to be consistent with our values, but, unfortunately, I think most ESG is more marketing than substance.