Adam Gordon
Adam Gordon
Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Wildflower
Since founding Wildflower with Matthew Dicker in 2017, Adam Gordon has built the real estate development firm around outside-the-box property sectors in New York City.
Wildflower has carved out a niche specializing in the e-commerce and studio sectors in particular. This strategy included buying a 5.25-acre site in Astoria, Queens, in 2019 for a planned 775,000-square-foot, multilevel Hollywood-style studio. The New York City Department of Buildings gave approval in February to commence construction on the ambitious project.
“The studio is a physical statement of the future for entertainment in all forms as a tool for storytelling,” Gordon said. “As an architectural gesture it’s a statement that New York City is the place creatives come to have inspired careers.”
Gordon said the Wildflower Studios development will fill a crucial void in New York’s film industry by providing the Big Apple a permanent, full-scale production facility similar to what Los Angeles has seen built up over the years. The project, which it developed in partnership with actor Robert De Niro, has the potential to dramatically transform New York’s film industry.
On the logistics front, Wildflower is Amazon’s most active e-commerce warehouse and parking developer in New York City. It sold two Amazon-operated warehouses in East New York, Brooklyn, for $230 million in April to CBRE Investment Management nearly three years after purchasing the assets for $23.5 million.
Manhattan-based Wildflower is in the midst of selling off its self-storage portfolio, too, in order to narrow its focus to the e-commerce and film studio sectors. One of these deals involved offloading 3350 Park Avenue in the Bronx’s Morrisania neighborhood to Storage Post Self Storage in March for $64 million four years after purchasing the 138,000-square-foot property for $13 million.
Gordon, a fourth-generation New Yorker, is looking to continue targeting nontraditional asset classes in and around the city and has no plans to morph into a more traditional CRE development firm.
“We’re not inhibited by convention,” Gordon said. “Wildflower’s DNA is curiosity and innovation.”
