Thomas Elghanayan, Frederick Elghanayan and Jake Elghanayan

Developer and owner TF Cornerstone plans later this year to take an additional 10,000 square feet to expand its headquarters at 387 Park Avenue South, a building it owns in Manhattan’s NoMad neighborhood. The move underscored the company’s health under the direction of brothers Thomas and Frederick Elghanayan and Jake Elghanayan (Thomas’s son). 

The recent past and near-term future include the opening early last year of Brooklyn’s 595 Dean Street, an 800-unit multifamily complex that also includes a 100,000-square-foot Chelsea Piers footprint at its base. TF Cornerstone is also rolling out its two-building, nearly 1,400-unit Malt Drive apartment complex in Long Island City, Queens. The company, too, plans demolition work this year ahead of its 200-unit 273 West 22nd Street in Chelsea. 

“We’re pretty slow and steady on the multifamily front,” Jake Elghanayan said. “We always believe in New York. We always believe in adding. There’s a housing supply crunch, and we want to do our small part in alleviating that.”

To that end, TF Cornerstone is also pursuing office-to-residential conversions where it works, Elghanayan said. That includes a suburban office property in Reston, Va. And, though the company is most known for its thousands of apartments, it does own more than 2.8 million square feet of New York City and Washington, D.C.-area office space (and hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail in both). 

That office footprint could soon grow gargantuanly. TF Cornerstone and RXR are behind 175 Park Avenue, a planned 83-story, 2.2 million-square-foot tower of mostly office space — one of the largest office developments in the U.S. 

“We’ve advanced plans to a really good point, and we’re just trying to land that anchor tenant to kick off construction,” Jake Elghanayan said. He added that he’s confident an anchor tenant would materialize this year. 

Meanwhile, TF Cornerstone has little in the way of wobbly debt in search of refinancing. “We’re well positioned to be a bit more aggressive this year,” said Jake Elghanayan, who left a law career to help run the family firm. 

Don’t get him wrong, though: “I enjoyed being an attorney. Some people talk about it like it’s doing a prison stint, but I didn’t feel that way.”