Stephen Ross, Jeff Blau and Bruce Beal

Where to begin with perhaps the country’s most active real estate developer and investor? 

Let’s first travel to beautiful Queens, N.Y., where the Related Companies that Stephen Ross, Jeff Blau and Bruce Beal lead landed the rights in March to co-develop a 25,000-seat professional soccer stadium as part of a vast development that includes 1,100 affordable housing units and a 350-room hotel.

Then we can hop the East River to Manhattan, and find Related bringing the office portion of Hudson Yards — the de facto neighborhood it co-developed with Oxford Properties as the nation’s largest private real estate project — to more than 90 percent occupied at some of the highest taking rents in the U.S. This amid the most challenging office leasing market in a generation. 

“We have redefined what I call Class AA or new modern office buildings, and have created a differentiated product,” Blau said of Hudson Yards, where the company also hopes to add a casino. “When people say, ‘The office sector is terrible,’ it’s a totally different product we have on offer here.” 

Staying in New York, we can note the 5 percent stake in a $5.8 billion pool of loans from the defunct Signature Bank tied to rent-regulated apartments that a Related affiliate won in December. Related and its partners won the stake from federal regulators by offering 59 cents on the dollar. 

We could then fan out to the rest of the country. Throughout we’d find Related busy with partners and through its own affiliates in markets such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and Washington, D.C., in both residential (where it owns more than 19,000 apartments and more than three times that number of affordable and workforce units, plus 9,000 condos) and office (where it owns 40 million square feet of commercial space — not including some projects in the pipeline). Also on display: a major life sciences project in Boston’s Seaport District, where Related this spring broke ground on another development for pharmaceutical giant Vertex.

But let’s not linger in the New England chill. On to South Florida, where a particularly busy Related is already the largest Class A office owner in West Palm Beach — Ross’s preferred stomping grounds in the region — with plans to build more there and in the general Miami area. Just this past April, Related secured approvals to develop a $300 million hotel next to the West Palm Beach convention center. 

Were we to continue our national whirlwind, we would find any number of side businesses to go along with Related’s main real estate focus. There’s the fabricated steel plant in western New York; the facades manufacturer in eastern Pennsylvania; the clean energy firm energyRe, in which Related’s principals are founding investors and which announced $1.2 billion more in capital in December; and Related Construction, which is exactly what it sounds like. 

Holding this empire together? According to Blau and Beal, the glue is the fact that Related stays managerially involved in what it builds and buys. “We’re constantly at where the demand is and what people want,” Blau said.