Laura Hines-Pierce, Sarah Hawkins and Jason Alderman

Just as a good card player knows when to throw away a money-losing hand, a good real estate company knows when to bide its time.

Hines, one of the premier owners and developers in New York (and, for that matter, around the country), essentially took its foot off the gas last year. In Gotham, there were no major acquisitions or projects coming out of the ground. Indeed, even as other developers were jumping on the office-to-residential conversion bandwagon, Hines retained a healthy skepticism.

“The truth is, it is hard,” Laura Hines-Pierce said at the Urban Land Institute’s Los Angeles conference last fall. “There are numbers from Gensler which said that only 11 percent is even in the range of possibility [for conversion] based on floor plates” and of the 35 she looked at “only one is moving forward.”

However, with a large pool of capital that has been sitting on the sidelines, and given the fact that the interest rate environment has more or less settled, the Texas-based company with $93.2 billion in assets under management is poised to transact again in the next 12 to 24 months. Indeed, in April Fortune magazine reported that Hines launched a new platform called Hines Private Wealth Solutions and already raised $10.7 billion.

This is not to say that the folks at Hines didn’t have plenty to keep them busy from their New York offices, under Jason Alderman and Sarah Hawkins in Hudson Square, in the last year or so.

While land, construction and financing costs have made many new construction projects prohibitively expensive in Manhattan, last spring the company opened its second senior housing project in Manhattan on the Upper West Side called The Apsley, which has been nicely leasing up. Hines is looking at another senior housing project north of the city.

Speaking of north of the city, Hines has been deeply ensconced in its massive project Northlight which is part of Edge-on-Hudson, an 1,177-unit, mixed-used development in Sleepy Hollow spanning over 70 acres that includes a 140-key hotel and 135,000 square feet of retail. Northlight has been achieving some of the highest rent growth in Westchester County (like a 17 percent spike in rent growth last quarter).

On the East Coast the company just opened Washington, D.C.’s largest co-living asset as well as student housing, and have developed 775 lots for single-family housing as part of a master-planned community called Hartland in Aldie, Virginia. In Boston, Hines is building a tower atop the South Station transit hub, which will come with Ritz-Carlton-branded condos and office.

And, hey, with an extra $10.7 billion to play with, we expect Hines to be doing a lot in 2024 in New York and beyond.