Rob Speyer

Real estate, for the most part, is a local business. But Tishman Speyer has remained a global giant for decades. 

Its portfolio spans 90 million square feet and includes iconic properties such as the Paris stock exchange building, New York’s MetLife Building and much of Rockefeller Center. Since 2008, Rob Speyer, son and grandson of company founders Jerry Speyer and Robert Tishman, has led the behemoth. And the titanic ambitions have carried through the generations. 

Just look at Tishman Speyer’s deal in Boston. In June, the Manhattan-based developer raised $750 million to build a 900,000-square-foot research center with Harvard University. The financing became one of the largest construction packages to close nationally in 2023 — a significant feat in this high interest rate environment. 

In Chicago, Tishman Speyer paid $128 million for a 357-unit rental complex in the Union West neighborhood. The purchase went down as one of the Windy City’s largest residential deals in 2023. On the East Coast, the developer raised $300 million to build 1,000 rentals in Jersey City, N.J. This all happened in the span of one month — December 2023 — in another sign of the developer’s gargantuan size and power

There’s more. The Spiral, the 66-story office that Bjarke Ingels Group designed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, has turned out fairly well, despite the slowdown in office leasing. Anchor tenants include HSBC, which this year opened its 265,000-square-foot U.S. headquarters there, and Pfizer, which signed for 746,000 square feet. The 2.8 million-square-foot building is now at least 75 percent occupied, with asking rents that range between $125 and $225 a square foot, some of the highest asking rents for office space in the U.S. 

Despite its large size, the company has remained nimble, investing in proptech companies. It also launched an early-stage proptech fund, which raised $108 million last year. The move shows that Tishman Speyer is not complacent.