Nightingale Properties
The Nightingale Group is a privately held commercial real estate investment firm. Founded in 2005 by Elie Schwartz and Simon Singer, the firm targets value-oriented investments across the U.S. with specific repositioning or redevelopment opportunities.
The Manhattan-based firm is well known for its New York holdings, which include 111 Wall Street, 300 Lafayette and 20 East 46th Street. It also has a substantial Philadelphia office portfolio and assets in 22 states in total. The firm’s holdings currently span 11 million square feet of office and retail space under management.
In August 2019, Nightingale teamed up with Wafra Capital Partners to acquire the Coca-Cola Building at 711 Fifth Avenue in New York before flipping it only a month later to a partnership of developers that included Michael Shvo and Bilgili Group.
Wafra, a Kuwait-backed investment firm, is a frequent capital partner of Nightingale’s, co-investing in a number of its acquisitions, including 111 Wall Street.
Schwartz and Singer both grew up in Brooklyn. Although they attended the same summer camp as children, their paths didn’t cross until much later in life when Singer —then in-house counsel for a real estate development company — hired Schwartz’s I.T. consulting firm to set up a network in his office. The rest, as they say, is history.
Nightingale got its name from a play on words of the founders’ names. The name Schwartz means black in Yiddish (so, black as night). Pair that with Singer, and you’ve got a night singer, or a nightingale.
