Douglas Eisenberg (top right), James Patchett (bottom right) and Maggie McCormick (left).
Douglas Eisenberg, James Patchett and Maggie McCormick
Executive Chairman and Co-Founder; CEO; and President at A&E Real Estate
While A&E had a successful year in multifamily development, perhaps its biggest news in 2021 came on the personnel side. James Patchett, former president and CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, joined the company as CEO last April.
“I joined A&E because I shared the company’s vision about the fundamental strengths of New York City,” Patchett said. “This seems obvious now, but going back to mid-2020, people were unsure what the future of a city like New York was. A lot of people relocated, and there was a conversation about a mass exodus. I had a very strong conviction that this was going to be a moment in time, and that New York City was going to come roaring back. And that is the premise on which A&E has been built for the last 10 years.”
A&E executed several major acquisitions in 2021, including the largest single multifamily deal in Queens since the start of the pandemic in Cunningham Heights, which includes 22 three-story buildings containing 1,056 rental apartments in Queens Village. A&E paid The Benjamin Companies $130 million for the complex.
The company’s other acquisitions included 400 East 57th Street, 1080 Amsterdam Avenue and 140 Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan. In Queens, the company also acquired Georgian Hall and Ravenna Court in Jackson Heights, and 92-40 Queens Boulevard in Rego Park.
All told, these added more than 2,000 units to A&E’s portfolio, and accounted for more than $500 million in deal volume.
“Me and the founders shared a conviction through COVID that others were sitting on the sidelines,” Patchett said. “So we spent 2021 locking up deals at attractive valuations, when there wasn’t a ton of competition. That allowed us to pick up assets we wouldn’t have ordinarily been a player in.”
A&E also launched an in-house residential leasing company called 1898.
“We built our own in-house company so we could really monitor the day-to-day movement in the market, and not have to be dependent on outside brokers for information about rental rates in every submarket we were in, which is essentially every submarket,” Patchett said. “Having that direct firsthand knowledge put us in a position to be that much farther ahead as the leasing market picked up beginning last spring and through the end of the year.”
