Power 100 2023

It’s more difficult than ever to understand power in a post-COVID world

By May 16, 2023 7:00 AM
Loading the player...

We can’t all be Logan Roy.

While Logan’s power — stemming from the alliances, betrayals, and family psychodrama worthy of a series of sessions with Sigmund Freud — makes for great TV via HBO’s “Succession,” power means something different to most of the names on this year’s Power 100.

We imagine that many of these people are also aware of the sacrifices of power and its duller, less glamorous labor.

Last week, the proudest, richest and most consequential people on Power 100 no doubt felt a twinge of humility when the federal government officially ended COVID-19’s classification as a national emergency. The last three years was one long, arduous lesson in the simple truth that nature is the ultimate arbiter of power.

But it’s the ability to recognize where the trends are heading, to synthesize the available data and to prepare for the inevitable headwinds that steered the honorees that we chose onto this list and its most coveted positions.

A couple of months ago, as the Commercial Observer team began our first conversations about what you’re reading now, we asked our friends at CompStak for their list of the biggest office owners in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The names were largely familiar to our readers: Brookfield being the top owner in New York and Los Angeles; Paramount Group the top dog in San Francisco; Boston Properties the big cheese in its eponymous city.

All the names were worthy of a place of honor and all of them had great and valuable real estate, but one of the things that we tried to show in this year’s Power 100 was that a lot of categories that were previously so safe are less sound in a work-from-home world.

The people selected (and we included more new names than ever before) were not necessarily coming from the financial capital of the world (New York), and they were not building what had previously been such a venerated asset (office). We tried to make this a truly national list, and one that was spread across all of commercial real estate. It’s a difficult task that also involves not very glamorous labor, but it is the fullest landscape we could offer of commercial real estate’s power structure in 2023.

1

Jamie Dimon

JP Morgan Chase

2

Jerome Powell

the Federal Reserve

4 +23

Barry Sternlicht

Starwood Capital Group and Starwood Property Trust 

5 -1
6 -1

Hamid Moghadam

Prologis

8 -5

Ben Brown

Brookfield's Real Estate Group

9 -7
10 +18

Bob Faith

Greystar Real Estate Partners

11

Sam Zell and Mark Parrell

Equity Residential

12 +3
15 +22

Bruce Mosler and Toby Dodd

Cushman & Wakefield

17 +55

Matt Kelly

JBG SMITH

18 +17

Michael Hackman

Hackman Capital Partners

19 -12

Rob Speyer

Tishman Speyer