Larry Gluck

Laurence Gluck is the founder and CEO of Stellar Management, an owner and operator of real estate whose portfolio consists of 12,000 apartments in 100 buildings in New York and Miami, according to Stellar’s website.

Gluck was born in 1953 and grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath, rent-controlled apartment in the Bronx with two brothers and a sister, and attended Queens College and then law school at St. John’s University, according to an interview with Michael Stoller.

Gluck started as a litigator at Proskauer, Rose before switching to real estate law at Dreyer & Traub. He purchased his first piece of property after running across a classified ad in The New York Times for a Carroll Gardens property at 540 Henry Street for $192,000. He teamed up with Steve Witkoff looking for places to buy in Inwood. Gluck founded Stellar (combining the names “Steve” and “Larry”) in 1985, with the intention of repositioning workforce housing.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s Stellar began buying up aging Mitchell-Lama projects whose housing subsidies were set to expire and renting their units at market rates, which resulted in clashes between Stellar and tenant advocacy groups.

But Stellar has also built a great deal of ground-up residential, including multiple properties on Columbus and Amsterdam avenues on the Upper West Side.

Stellar also made huge forays into commercial property ownership, including iconic properties like the Daily News Building, at 220 West 42nd Street, which they paid $100 per square foot for when they bought it in the early 1990s. “It sounds silly now, but ... it was 1 million square feet so it’s $100 million, it was a fairly astonishing amount of money,” Gluck told Stoller. Among properties Stellar has owned have included 1 Broadway, 2 Rector Street, One SoHo Square, 570 Lexington Avenue and the Olcott Hotel.