Eddie Bender, 34

It was the first months of the pandemic, and Eddie Bender’s Prosper Property Group went for it. 

“COVID hit, and everyone else was scared shitless of New York City,” Bender recalled.

Not these guys. 

The company Bender had co-founded with Damien Smith just the year before leveraged its last $1 million and then some to acquire 63 Pitt Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The seller needed to unload the property as the pandemic shut down whole segments of the U.S. economy. He and Smith might lose that $1 million saving their Prosper Property Group. So why not risk it?

The risk paid off. They would demolish the five-story building at 63 Pitt, and replace it with a 12-story, 59-unit luxury rental. It was 13 months from the start of construction to the first tenant arriving in August 2021. 

Prosper Property was saved from its name being rendered bitterly ironic as it quickly added one project after another on both the development and the contracting sides of the company. That latter employs about 30 people, Bender said. He handles the operational and financial aspects of Prosper.

A northern New Jersey native who earned a finance and accounting degree from Syracuse University, Bender cut his construction teeth on smaller projects in Queens and Brooklyn. He met Smith, a contracting ace, along the way, and they combined skills to launch Prosper.

The company has worked on myriad luxury rental and condo projects since. That includes Tribeca’s 32 Walker Street, where the penthouse is asking $18 million, and the Flatiron District’s 34-unit 10 West 17th Street, as well as other condo projects in Tribeca and the Upper East Side. 

Staying busy is the company’s secret sauce, especially when it comes to shifting construction costs and dealing with fresh spools of red tape. 

“When you know things inside and out because you’ve done this many projects on the contracting side for other people or the development side for yourself, you’ve really seen everything,” Bender said. “That’s really our main competitive edge: having the contracting side and having five projects for other developers going on while we have our own projects going on.”