Idan Ofer

With a net worth north of $35 billion, one wouldn’t blame Idan Ofer for spending the rest of the decade watching his soccer team, Atlético Madrid, push around its La Liga competition from luxury boxes throughout Europe.

But the Quantum Pacific Group founder has big plans for Manhattan that involve buying underutilized office properties and converting two of them into appealing apartment towers in the Financial District, one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city.

Thanks to Mayor Eric Adams’s City of Yes zoning, the most significant overhaul of the city’s zoning rules in decades which passed in 2024, developers can more easily convert commercial office buildings that existed before 1990 into residential properties and claim property tax exemptions to do so.

Since then, Ofer’s U.K.-based real estate company has had three high-profile office acquisitions in the works.

In 2024, Quantum Pacific picked up 767 Third Avenue from Sage Realty for $88 million. Last year, Quantum and Nathan Berman’s Metro Loft purchased 101 Greenwich Street from BentallGreenOak for a bit over $100 million. Then, in December, the firm filed plans with the city to convert the historic 26-story Beaux Arts tower into 614 units of housing.

By April, Ofer and Berman teamed once again to close on 1 Whitehall Street from LoneCore Capital, a debt fund that foreclosed on the property in December, for roughly $100 million. Their plan is to transform the 21-story building into a rental high-rise. (Commercial Observer is currently a tenant in the building, by the way.)

Creating new apartments in Manhattan looks like a wise investment strategy. With New York’s rental vacancy rate below 2 percent and Manhattan’s median rents surpassing $5,000 per month earlier this year, Quantum Pacific could be well positioned to capitalize on the  conversions even if the economy goes south.