Joseph Chetrit and Meyer Chetrit.
Joseph Chetrit and Meyer Chetrit
Founder; president at Chetrit Group
Last year's rank: 86
They’re an enigmatic bunch, the Chetrits. (How dare they not speak freely to the press!)
They should be a lot more well known. After all, the family and its firm, which brothers Joseph and Meyer Chetrit run, are perennially among the busiest in commercial real estate investment and development, especially in New York — and 2023 was no exception.
Last year brought major projects to the drawing board. These included the largest filing with New York City officials in 2023, according to The Real Deal: a 71-story tower in Manhattan’s Two Bridges area (Chetrit acquired the site for $100 million in 2021). The company also filed plans for a 360,000-square-foot, 743-foot skyscraper at 100 West 37th Street that’s supposed to have around 300 condos and tens of thousands of square feet of commercial space.
In fact, based on its filings with the city’s Buildings Department, TRD ranked the Chetrit Group as New York’s busiest developer for the 12 months ended May 1, 2023, with proposals totaling nearly 2 million square feet.
To finance such activity, of course, the Chetrit brothers secured some of 2023’s most notable loans — itself a sign of influence given lenders’ general skittishness in a market awash with distress. These included a $235 million construction loan in November for a two-tower residential development on the Upper East Side. Eight months before that, Chetrit nailed a $55 million financing package for a residential project in Fort Lee, N.J.
Of course, with such reach comes the odd stumble. The Chetrit Group had loans hit special servicing and had to offload assets for losses. In fact, one of the 10 biggest New York City investment sales of 2023 was Chetrit’s $266 million sale of the 850 Third Avenue office building to its lender. The company had bought the building for $422 million four years earlier.
You’ll note, dear reader, that we have yet to really exit the New York area in our exposition on the Chetrit brothers. They are also busy in South Florida, where their 4 million-square-foot River District mixed-use project in Miami is inching toward completion over the next two years.
