Adam Flatto
Adam Flatto
CEO and President at Georgetown Company
We’re not sure that 2020 will be remembered as the year of the slam-dunk, 1.1 million-square-foot, billion-dollar-plus Far West Side, swanky development — but we’re going to make an exception for Georgetown’s Adam Flatto.
The company unveiled plans to turn an old parking lot right off of the High Line on 12th Avenue, between West 29th and West 30th Streets, into just such a development earlier this year. And when they’re done, the 25-story colossus will be well in league with its Hudson Yards and Manhattan West neighbors. (They’re expected to break ground next year.) Global pandemic, or not, it’s a power move.
This is not to say that the Georgetown Company has been ignoring the pandemic or immune to it.
“The first six to eight weeks were an all-hands, mad rush to put in contingency plans, anticipating what would happen with tenants and various loans,” Flatto told Commercial Observer. However, Flatto adds, Georgetown was lucky. Their retail and hotel property got forbearance and interest deferrals. “We talked to the tenants we knew would be impacted, and in almost every case we worked out a reasonable deferral of rent.”
It was a very expansive and difficult constellation of real estate to juggle. While Georgetown’s 35-person team headquartered in Midtown has some very important New York real estate in its portfolio (the IAC Building, for instance, and 787 Eleventh Avenue), the company has a far-flung real estate empire, with projects like the redevelopment of the Herald-Examiner Building in Downtown L.A. (which was rented to Arizona State University earlier this year) and multifamily developments on State Street in Chicago. But the diamond in its crown is Easton, Ohio, a community of some 1,300 acres near Columbus, Ohio, that the company has been masterplanning and working on for 20 years. A good portion of what they’ve built in Easton has been retail.
“We’re fortunate that the town center, which has 2 million square feet of retail, is open air — I think it represents what will be the successful retail format going forward.”
Flatto took over Georgetown from its founder Marshall Rose (who remains Georgetown’s chairman) about a decade ago, who was a mentor and a source of inspiration. It was Rose who encouraged his “commitment on the nonprofit side,” said Flatto, which included involvement with the Park Avenue Armory, Enterprise Community Partners, the homeless committee of the Robin Hood Foundation and Rand International (where Flatto sits on the board).
“For all the people who work at Georgetown that’s so critically important and it was a legacy born of Marshall … It’s a legacy I try to live up to.”—M.G.
