New York’s Plaza Hotel is in the sights of this low-profile billionaire
BEN ASHKENAZY bought his first piece of property when he was right out of high school, with a little help from his dad. Three decades later, his collection boasts some of America’s bestknown buildings.
As far as real estate tycoons go, though, he’s a candidate for least known.
He keeps a very low profile for someone whose company has a US$ 12 billion ( RM54 billion) portfolio – including Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Washington’s Union Station and a piece of the Plaza Hotel in New York – and just paid about US$ 750 million for the Grosvenor House hotel on London’s Park Lane. Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. itself had to scale a namerecognition hurdle to make an earlier deal in the British capital.
“The first time I took their call, I told them I didn’t know who they were and put the phone down,” said Robin Coady, whose firm Coady Supple negotiated the 2013 deal for the owner when Ashkenazy bought Old Spitalfields Market, which it has since sold. “I’d never heard of them.”
By then Ashkenazy Acquisition had built an empire of retail, hotel and office assets. And its 48year- old founder and chairman was amassing a fortune, one that made it possible for him to hire the rapper Drake to perform for his daughter’s bat mitzvah at the Rainbow Room last year.
Ashkenazy’s net worth is US$ 4.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, vaulting him into the ranks of the world’s 500 richest people.
His company counts among its holdings the long-term lease to another Boston landmark, South Station ( Faneuil Hall and Union Station are also lease deals, with rights to operate retail and commercial space). Ashkenazy Acquisition owns dozens of other properties, including San Francisco’s One Union Square, the Barneys store buildings in New York and Beverly Hills, Harborplace in Baltimore and the former church in Manhattan’s Chelsea district that once housed the Limelight nightclub.
Born in Israel and raised on Long Island, Ashkenazy started early, under the guidance of his father, Izzy, a retailer and property investor.
“I bought my first building when I was 17 and kept on buying,” the younger Ashkenazy told the magazine Real Estate Weekly in 2001. “My long-term plan is to basically hold on to prime real estate.” That was one of the last interviews the pressshy mogul gave. He declined to comment for this story.
As Ashkenazy Acquisition grew, it occasionally joined forces with some of the world’s richest people, including New York’s Gindi family, owners of Century 21 Department Stores Inc. “Predominantly the partners that we bring in are super high-net-worth individuals and families,” the company’s president and vice chairman, Michael Alpert, told the New York Times in 2012.
It’s an increasingly busy commercial real- estate investor class. “We see more and more private investments driving those markets,” said Anthony Duggan, head of capital markets research at London-based broker Knight Frank.
“It’s more-patient money. They have a different way of appraising value.”
That fits snugly with Ashkenazy Acquisition’s approach. Take its US$ 400 million purchase of the land under 625 Madison Avenue back in 2013.
The price raised eyebrows, given that the property yielded lease income of just US$ 4.6 million a year. But Ashkenazy was looking ahead to a rent reset that will take place in 2022 and the plot’s development potential.
A marketing document for prospective investors detailed the plan: Repositioning the building or developing a new tower in its place could push the property’s value into the billions, according to the pitch. — WP-Bloomberg