Anthony Malkin
As its chief executive, chairman and president, Anthony Malkin is the top executive and the public face of Empire State Realty Trust, one of the New York area’s leading owners and operators of commercial real estate.
Malkin and his father, Peter Malkin, founded ESRT out of its family-controlled real estate holdings in 2011 and took it public in 2013 following a sometimes spirited back and forth with other stakeholders regarding the move.
The real estate investment trust’s holdings include nine Midtown office properties, most prominently the Empire State Building but also including 250 West 57th Street, 1400 Broadway, One Grand Central Place, 111 West 33rd Street, and 1350 Broadway. It also owns five office properties in Connecticut’s Fairfield County and New York’s Westchester County as well as five retail addresses in Manhattan and Westport, Conn.
Anthony Malkin’s involvement with ESRT’s precursors, Wien & Malkin, W&H Properties and Malkin Holdings, dates from 1989, four years after he graduated with honors from Harvard. In that interim, he worked for a leveraged buyout venture associated with Chemical Bank. From 1989 on, he held various positions in the family concern, started by his grandfather, Lawrence Wien, a pioneer in the syndication of commercial real estate to allow for more individual investors.
Wien’s grandson, Anthony, as chairman, CEO and—since 2020—president of ESRT, has made a name for himself as a pioneer in commercial real estate sustainability. His company’s most notable effort to date in that regard was a retrofit of the Empire State Building to cut its carbon emissions.
“We have been leaders in environmental air quality for more than a decade,” Malkin told CO in 2020. “We did it to gain a competitive advantage; healthier buildings make for better work environments.”
Malkin was born in January 1962 in Manhattan, and has two siblings. His sister, Cynthia Allison Malkin, is married to U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Malkin married Shelly Belfer, then a teacher at a private elementary school, in 1987.
