Jordan Slone and Richard Litton.
Jordan Slone and Richard Litton
Chairman and CEO; president at Harbor Group International
Last year's rank: 76
It says a lot about a commercial real estate company that its biggest sale of a calendar year just scratches the surface.
That’s the case with the privately held, Norfolk, Va.-based Harbor Group International (HGI) led by Jordan Slone and Richard Litton. The company sold a six-property, 1,722-unit multifamily portfolio in the Boston area to a fund under the Bridge Investment Group umbrella for $460 million in August, having acquired it in 2019 for $384 million.
It was the kind of deal that might define the year for most companies. For HGI — a firm with an investment portfolio it says is worth around $19 billion and which includes 54,000 apartments and 5 million square feet of commercial space, including overseas — it was a mere touchpoint within a juggernaut that courses through a lot of different lines of commercial real estate.
There’s that multifamily business on the ownership and financing sides, including in the single-
family rental space (HGI took its first equity stake in that space in November via a 198-unit community along coastal North Carolina). And its credit business bumps against nearly every part of real estate financing, including preferred equity and mezzanine lending as well as Freddie Mac bonds.
“Relative to 2021, 2022, we bought a lot less real estate, for sure, and have tried to stay very disciplined on what we like in this environment,” Litton said of 2023. “We’re way down in terms of the amount of real estate we’ve purchased, but we’ve been able to execute a lot of investments in the credit space.”
There’s the office business, too, which includes the lease-up of the 38-story Black Rock office building on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street that HGI bought from ViacomCBS nearly three years ago for $760 million. CBS, the main tenant, was moving out. The building by early 2024 was nevertheless around 90 percent leased due to 325,000 square feet in new deals and renewals under HGI, according to the New York Post.
Also, given its own standing, in 2023 HGI was able to refinance around $500 million of its own debt. It brought the share of its fixed-rate debt from 65 percent to 80 percent, Litton said, improving its own durability for the higher-for-longer interest rate era.
