Latest / The Promote Podcast / Gary Barnett: The Father of Billionaires' Row
Transcript
- Hiten Samtani (00:03.81) He's probably the quintessential developer's developer. The guy that people look to to set the tone for the market. Takes huge swings, births entirely new markets like Billionaire's Row. Transaction he requested Will Krasne (00:22.329) a real truly New York transaction. Hiten Samtani (00:28.408) No one fucks with complexity like Gary Barnett. No one stitches together global capital stacks like Gary Barnett. No one combines the light and dark arts of assemblage, litigation, capital raising, development and sales like Gary Barnett. and nobody has great big balls like Gary Barnett. It is true, no one has Gary Barnett's balls. Hiten Samtani (00:51.896) Welcome to the first special edition of the Promote Podcast. It's all about Gary, the father of billionaires, the master of high octane New York deal making. No builder of this generation has the Gary Barnett mystique. He reminds me a little bit of Harry Helmsley or Bill Zeckendorf back in the day. So we'll crazy and I are going to chop it up on Gary Barnett today. Hiten Samtani (01:16.536) Why are we thinking of now? guess he's very much back in the news. Yeah, he's stitching together the land and cash for a Madison Avenue tower. He's got a Times Square hotel. He's getting Ikea to invest in their own store. Chanel is apparently in talks to take space at the Madison Avenue Tower as well, so... Take space is a very polite way of saying they're gonna spend half a billion dollars taking down some of it. So Gary just continually pulls rabbits out of his hat and is able to go where others don't dare. I think so. think he's probably put him at the right at the top when I think of characters that I've covered and watched for so many years. And I thought that we could look at two of the deals that I think are quintessential Barnett deals. Deals that no one else would probably even have the chutzpah to even try. Will Krasne (02:04.526) Totally. There's a very important metric in private equity and in real estate finance, which often gets neglected. It's ROIBD, return on invested brain damage. And I'll tell you what, Gary incurs more brain damage than just about anyone I know. So I think it's a great place to start. But I think before we get into some of these deals, think Hattam, let's just talk a little bit about his background because he truly is a sui generis character. to us. Will Krasne (02:33.462) in New York real estate. So I guess we got to go back to the diamond Boris of Antwerp. Every hero has an origin story, right? And Gary Barnett's origin story probably begins in the diamond exchange of Belgium. So how do we get there? Sometime in the eighties, Gary Barnett goes to Florida and he meets a woman, right? All great tales start with a woman. So he meets a woman, name's Evelyn Muller. She's the daughter of a prominent diamond dealer. He marries her and then he's absorbed into the family business. They're like, okay, come here and we'll... show you our world. So then he spends the next decade or so in Belgium. Is there anything before that? honestly don't know anything from before this story. Where was he born? Did he have a job? Yeah, he's born on the Lower East Side. He's the son of a Talmud scholar. That's really all I know about him before this. And then he just kind of drops into the 80s and into this diamond exchange world. Will Krasne (03:27.118) Yeah. So he goes over to Belgium, which is one of the hubs of the global diamond trade. if you've seen, I was going to say snatch. gems. Will Krasne (03:42.648) Where's the stone? But the thing about the diamond industry is that it generates a lot of profits and oftentimes you want to get those profits out of the diamond industry. So, Hedan, what happens next? So what happens is Gary, when you're in the mix like this, you kind of become the go-to guy. So not only does he reinvest the Mueller family's profits into US real estate, he also kind of becomes a conduit for other diamond families to put their money into US real estate. And so he goes, he's already helped the Mullers expand their diamond business into the US and then real estate becomes a natural jumping off point. So he becomes the guy who's essentially running a bunch of diamond money into US real estate projects. This is not, know, he didn't show up and start building Central Park Tower. I think he was the largest landowner in Wichita at one point. And he was buying shopping centers throughout the Midwest and had a pretty big exit to a REIT, I believe, in the late nineties. the name of his company because it's a pretty good name. What was it? was... Hiten Samtani (04:45.26) Diamond Heritage Properties. There you go. So he sells off the malls very profitably, all his Midwest exposure pre-profitably, and shows up in New York. shows up in New York and he's sitting down with two guys who become big characters in their own right down the road, Kevin Maloney and Zeal Feldman of Property Markets Group. Right. had a matchstick table and we're a table from Home Depot and we're just like scrambling around trying to do deals. Okay, so in 1994, the guys buy what becomes their, I guess, their first trophy Manhattan building. It's called the Bell Nord. And what I love is that Barnett, at some point, described the property to his diamond investors as quote, a hundred carat diamond in the rough. It really does. So what is special about the Bell Nord? What makes it kind of a defining Gary Barnett transaction? Will Krasne (05:29.774) This guy knows his equity. Will Krasne (05:39.086) Super complicated, tons of complexity from a legal perspective, from a tenant perspective, from a construction perspective, basically everything that you can think of. And the price he paid in hindsight is laughable. I think they paid what, 15 million bucks, even in 1994. And then what's funny is doesn't Zeal buy this back? know, like 20 years later for like $500 million. my god. Hiten Samtani (06:00.012) He does. Years later, he does. And then he, I mean, he tries to convert it into luxury condos, but then HFZ implodes and that's a whole different story. right. But this was sort of his first big New York deal. And then he just steps on the gas. Hiten Samtani (06:22.06) In 2005, he makes a play for Atlantic Yards, the giant Brooklyn Pacific Park mega project. He steps in and he tries to take it away from Bruce Ratner at the 11th hour. And by the way, I'm staring out my window right now at Pacific Park. what could have been, but I think even in there, he did what the Orion, he did the W. He did a bunch of deals around there and I guess most prominently we should say he bought what is, what was known, many various points at television city, Riverside South, in which he kind of stole it from Trump and Trump wakes up one morning. He's like, what the fuck? This was my property. This is my deal. But Gary Barnett, who is still, I mean, relatively small player beats out related beats out for NATO and beats out Trump and gets this thing from Chinese investors. Right. And I think what's so funny about that story, the profile where this is laid out is that he talks about having to fly commercial, which I'm not sure is an issue that much anymore. But basically what you're talking about is a guy who went in 10 years from, you know, being the largest landowner in Wichita to buying some of the largest, most sought after development sites in New York and not just buying them. He gets stuff built on them. I love that you use that specific phrase because our current president also used something like that. I'm going to quote you from that excellent New York Magazine article. This is what Trump says, a lot of guys, I call them the rendering boys. They come in with renderings. They're always showing renderings, but never get them built. He gets them built. Will Krasne (07:53.304) think we call this the Frank McCourt. But I know, our office at TRD was basically right on that, on that lot, which he just bought and has been sitting on forever. That's amazing. So he goes in 10 years from scraping together money to put together small distressed apartment properties in New York to buying some of the largest, most sought after development sites in the entire city and not just buying them, getting them financed and built, which, you know, as Logan Royce said, congratulations on saying the biggest number, you fucking morons. But he's able to then go and actually do the hard stuff, which is executing, getting it planned. more Will Krasne (08:32.174) permitted, designed, financed, and built. What's also interesting about him is he's really not to the manner born when you meet the guy, he's a very, very, very awkward character, know, ill-fitting suits, no real kind of time for any social niceties of any kind. You know, he's just perfectly uninterested in all the trappings of wealth. He just seems like a deal junkie who likes to build things and make a lot of money. He lives in Queens. He lives in Richmond Hill, Queens, like middle-class neighborhood. Yeah, but I'll tell you what, he may be unassuming and come off as boring, but you can't do what he's done without being...psychotic is maybe too strong a word, but like pretty cool. Because, I mean, I was rereading some stuff in preparation for this podcast and I almost got hives thinking about some of the risk he's taken. This seems to be like a risk tolerance gene is just an overdrive here, right? He does this over and over. He puts his own fortune on the line. We're not going to talk about Central Park Tower today, but he like builds a super tall thing without a construction loan in place. Like he, just goes for it every single time over three decades. like that guy who climbed El Capitan with no rope. He's got like the fear gene that's kind of in his brain like doesn't fire correctly or something like that. Like that's kind of what he's got. But you know, we've given a little bit of the background. Why don't we go ahead and talk about the deal that sort of quintessential Gary. Hiten Samtani (09:42.732) Alex, no no Hiten Samtani (09:59.106) This is one of the defining deals of the Gary Barnett mythology, 157, also known as Carnegie Tower. Will, you've assembled, have you ever assembled property? Absolutely not. Actually, wait, no, that's not true. I have. I did once. How long did it take you that whole assemblage? Like two years? Okay, how about 15 years in the center of Manhattan? So that's what we're talking about here. Dude. Will Krasne (10:19.082) Yeah, that's... Again, the return on invested brain damage. The brain damage in career is just massive. It's absolutely incredible. He starts building this thing kind of in the thick of the financial crisis. And this is 157. We're talking about a super tall tower kissing Central Park. And again, what I find very fascinating about this, this is not just a big project that requires a lot of money upfront, et cetera. It's also a type of product that's untested, right? We had 15 Central Park West, which is a certain kind of condo, you know, catering to wealthy New Yorkers, wealthy Americans. 157 was a completely different prospect. 100%. The address says it all. 15 Central Park West. You're on Central Park West. Yep. And what was on 57th Street, it was considered a bit of no man's land. There, you know, it used to be what, dealership row or automobile row? Yeah, it's really not like it wasn't glamorous back in the day, which is hard to imagine now. It was kind of this dead stretch of what I think of as like prime Manhattan. Will Krasne (11:25.526) Right and the product that he was trying to sell and the price point he was trying to sell them at were completely untested. So the highest selling properties in New York had historically been co-ops, know, the fancy co-op buildings. So 740 Park Avenue is a perfect example of what you're talking about as well. Then you have 15 Central Park West, which was a record-breaking condo. The pioneering thing there was they really went for it. They really, really went for it all the way. The Zeckendorf's have kind of described it as kind of the maximal vision of elegance. 157, though, was kind of the maximal vision of show-stopping wealth as opposed to, you know, understated elegance. They call 15 Central Park West Limestone Jesus. And I think you call 157 like Darth Vader. It's quite a formidable and foreboding building. It's this shiny behemoth. It was a really strange kind of product type, but the pricing was even stranger. think this guy, Gary was kind of shooting for prices of 8,000, $9,000, even $10,000 a square foot in an area that didn't really kind of justify that. Well, think nothing justifies $8,000 a square foot. That's like caviar pricing. So he builds this or he gets this thing assembled over 15 years. the capital who's patient enough to deal with that. Don't even know how you begin to start. Hiten Samtani (12:38.188) But I mean, good luck. Hiten Samtani (12:51.182) So let's talk about that. Who does he find? So he needs about 700 million in equity for this project. Huge, huge ask. He only puts in about 10 % of it reportedly. So where does he get the rest? I mean, he gets it from a couple of Abu Dhabi based funds, what, Abar Investments and Kasimim Real Estate Company. Yeah, Abbar and Tasmeem, at least one of them was connected to this pretty shady guy called Khadim al-Khubaisi and Khubaisi becomes a very big figure down the road because he's kind of a central character in the 1MDB scandal later on. Fantastic. Yeah, he controls Abbar and they end up investing in 157. They kind of become the primary equity partner here. So he gets his money from Abu Dhabi. There are all these loosely connected sovereign wealth funds that tie back Did not know that. Hiten Samtani (13:39.608) to the royal family of Abu Dhabi, is one of, if not the world's richest, one of the top three richest families in the world. And remember, he's doing this at a time when we're coming out of the Great Recession, you know, no one is thinking about buying. Yeah, no one's building anything, which is the best time to be building something. And so it goes up. is a sensation and it has America's first hundred million dollar sale and the roster of folks in the building is sort of a who's who. So what it's Michael Dell. No one's building enough Will Krasne (14:21.806) Yeah, Lauren Stroll's a buyer. And then what's very funny is that if you look at the timing when he ended up buying Force India and turning it into Racing Point, he had to sell this condo because he sold this condo, he sold a racetrack he owned, he sold his boat to raise the liquidity. So it was a victim of Formula One's cash birth. know, cars be fully rebuilt, new gearbox, new... Who else we got? We got Bill Ackman who buys a property there purely as an investment. And what's funny here, and I think this kind of speaks broadly to what's happening at 157, Bill Ackman is explicit about this being an absentee purchase in the sense that he has no intention of living at the building. Right, yeah, I think he said that he thinks this is the best apartment in the world and he thinks it's gonna be worth half a billion dollars one day or something like that. That's right. And so what 157 does is it becomes kind of the magnet for all the controversy about this kind of new emerging asset class, which is shining condos on 57th street. 157 kicks off Billionaires Row, but it also becomes the magnet for like, who are we building for? Are we building for New Yorkers? Who are all these absentee owners? Is this going to benefit the city in any way? Is all the shady money coming in from all over the world really? So 157 7 takes all that heat and Gary Barnett seems to be okay with taking all that heat. Will Krasne (15:45.88) He built something that didn't exist and created an entire market and for this first deal I think he was completely right. So Gary Barnett comes in, builds this thing, takes a massive swing before anyone else does, brings in foreign money from pretty much everywhere to build this thing. Incredible construction risk, incredible sales and marketing execution. And yeah, there you go. You have the beginning of what is now known as Billionaire's Row. Through this deal, you go from someone who's done big deals and is a known entity to sort of becoming the guy. And around this time, you know, there's Bloomberg profiles, there's New York Magazine profile. He's got to be like a top five, top seven guy, don't you think? Yeah, he's a Pantheon player at this point. Hiten Samtani (16:37.43) Okay, so we've talked about kind of the glitziest of all luxury condos of its time, 157. I wanna zoom out and jump into a less glamorous asset class, but probably even more exciting for real estate insiders. And I'm talking about what Gary Barnett did with the Ring portfolio. Absolutely astonishing. So he ends up making almost $300 million in profits in the span of five or six years with this random bunch of abandoned or neglected buildings in Midtown South. Where do we begin with this? You have these brothers, the brothers ring and there's familial squabbles between the two of them. And again, it goes back like part of what we're seeing with office right now is that these buildings are actually expensive to maintain and to release. You've got to pay the broker. You got to pay the tenant improvements. You got to pay capex and they can deteriorate pretty quickly. so the ring brothers owned roughly It was like a million million plus square feet, but like in all pretty concentrated in midtown South. Yeah, so prime location and these buildings were basically vacant. But I think you also had a situation where the balance sheet was willing, but the income statement wasn't. So they had to come up with tons of cash to really lease this portfolio, which they probably didn't have. Hiten Samtani (17:55.918) But I think it was more like a disconnect between the two partners. there was a guy, Leo Ring, famous property manager of his time, savvy investor, started buying a bunch of these buildings and amassed a pretty healthy portfolio. His younger son, Frank, was like his guy and would work on these buildings with him. He had an older son, Michael, who was less interested in kind of the day-to-day stuff. When Leo dies, Frank and Michael can't really figure out what to do. So what happens is they kind of just say, okay, we do nothing. paralysis by analysis and they had to have been losing money for years. I think in an old article they said they were losing easily seven figures a year, just in carry. Yeah, and think about what's happening at the time in the Manhattan office market. Midtown South is a term that just popped up around this time. guess who's interested in this area suddenly? All the tech companies. Remember when Tami tenants were a thing and they came up in New York and everyone's talking about Facebook and all the tech tenants? No, they're saying how many square feet is BuzzFeed gonna take in my bill? So all these tenants are looking for homes in this neighborhood, which is suddenly the hottest office leasing market in the city. And there's this like million plus square feet that are just sitting unoccupied. How does Gary get involved in this thing? So Gary is as usual has a bunch of things going on. He's assembling the site for what I still think is the most bizarre project that I've seen. It's called the international gem tower. And it's like building of the diamond district that's just coming together. It's supposed to be kind of a hub for all these. Hiten Samtani (19:30.382) jewelry players. Anyway, so while he's assembling the project IGT, he comes across this family that owns a 75 % stake in one of the ring buildings. Okay. And the ring brothers owned the other 25%. Now they want to get rid of this because it's a complete dud. They're losing money on it, but they need to find a buyer who A is okay with only owning a 75 % stake and having complete uncertainty on the rest. Like no idea how there's going to be a resolution. So that essentially takes out most buyers because no one wants to deal with this crap. But Gary Barnett is kind of built for situations like this. Yeah, finds any little point of leverage and he can use it to take down the whole wall. mean, what did Archimedes say? Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the earth? Like that's kind of what Gary Barnett did here. So Gary Barnett says, fine, I'll do it. He buys a 75 % stake in this building from a family, and then he forces a partition. Right. So if you have two owners of a property and they can't, there's not a mechanism in the operating agreement for someone to have controls. Right. So generally if you have a managing member or voting control, you can do whatever you want. Other people sort of roll along for the ride. They can sue you, but like generally you, you know, you're driving the boat. If there's not a mechanism, you can resort to filing for partitions. So if you have a big parcel of land, for instance, generally they'll split it among the co-owners and everyone can kind of go their own way. Will Krasne (20:55.502) There's also a partition by sale, is what Gary was pushing for here. So essentially the property is sold and the proceeds are split. And this is when you can't really divide a building. So if you've got an office building, doesn't really, you can't really cut it 75 % to the left. By the way, this came up in the Flatiron Building Auction as well, so it's super interesting to people, because this whole dispute about partition sales, et cetera, was a factor there too. Right, so Gary says, all right, I'm gonna file for partition. They're gonna have to sell it. He goes, I'm already paid 75 % of it. He says something to that effect. says he told me I did an interview about this with him and he says we're playing with funny money. Obviously we're playing with funny money because we own 75 % of it we're paying ourselves so there's no one who can have business I mean, think he's right. It's like a lender showing up with a credit bid. Like they've already put the money in. Hiten Samtani (21:45.088) So yeah, he repeats the playbook. He buys a second building. He buys a 50 % stake in it, files for partition. The judge moves faster. And so like, there's some momentum for the strategy now. And then one brother decides he wants some cash. Right, so Michael Sency wants what, $100 million of liquidity? Suddenly, because that's what you need, right? Sometimes you just need a hundred million dollars in liquidity. But also I think you can kind of see the momentum building that this is just going to happen over and over and over again. And so maybe there's a way to get ahead of it and maximize your proceeds. So Michael goes around to some other really creative deal guys. And one of them is what Joey Tabak. And got to say like the portrait of a deal junkie in the real deal is one of the best closings I think that TRD has ever done. Thank Thank you. An all-timer. enjoyed that one very much because I was connected with Tabak and I thought I'd have a quick conversation with him. It turned into a three-hour conversation and Will, was not only smoking cigarettes, he was also crushing jewels at the same time. So Michael Dell is the one who, he's the first guy to break the hundred million dollar threshold in Manhattan. He goes to Joey Tabak and says, listen, I need a hundred million dollars. Joey Tabak, Will Krasne (22:47.788) outstanding. Hiten Samtani (23:00.142) does some kind of creative structuring where he loans him the money against what's known as a tick or a tenancy in common interest. And so he's got this deal done with Joey Tabak, but he gets deal makers remorse. So he doesn't know what to do. He's kind of in a, he's kind of in a jam here. And then Gary pounces again. But he's nervous about it. So he comes to us. He knows our reputation, his attorney knows us. They know that we are honorable businessmen, so to speak. Right. Barnett goes to Tabak and buys his new steak in the building. He basically pays him a chunk of money to say, you know, kindly fuck off. Thank you so much. Here's some money. Go. Will Krasne (23:42.626) Thank you for creating this little crack that I'm going to knock down. And then he repeats the playbook and files for a partition for the entire port. pays tobacco nice some I think it's 60 million dollars odd to kind of walk away says thank you so much you created a great opportunity ciao here's some money go away he gives Michael a fat check as well and then he immediately files for partition of the entire portfolio that's it that's checkmate Well, we're missing one important thing for one of our favorite characters in the Promote Cinematic Universe. Our favorite, Gurthly Mogul, was involved here too for a hot second. The girthy mogul's back. Exactly. Joe Chautreet's back. Joe Chautreet, who had partnered with Tobacco on the Deal, sues both Barnett and Tobacco, says that they ruined his deal and it's an ugly, ugly lawsuit. Super broker Doug Harmon gets involved, tries to play peacemaker, and when Doug Harmon's playing peacemaker, you know things are weird. And he writes an email to all of them and the email subject line is, ring a ding ding, boys. Hello. it. That's so good. Hiten Samtani (24:46.402) Tabak had a line where he says, if I knew how much brain damage I had to underwrite to make this deal happen, I wouldn't have done it. He used that word. used the same thing, underwriting on brain damage. Chitreed and Tabak have done so many deals together, International Toy Center, what have you, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions. But in New York real estate, things can get ugly in a second. Once that lawsuit's done, guess what? They're friends again. They'll do another deal down the road. It's not personal, it's just business, Michael. Hiten Samtani (25:18.734) So this is a sample of what Gary Barnett was able to do with the ring portfolio. Sold 251 Park Avenue South to File for $100 million plus. Sold 212 Fifth to Gladstone & Thor for $260 million. Ground leased a bunch to Kaufman for $200 million odd. As of 2015, we had calculated that his $450 million had turned into over $700 million. And this is when there were still a couple of deals pending, so that wasn't the end of the payday. So it's a pretty astonishing return. It's fantastic at that scale. And then remember that there's leverage. I mean, he probably made what? Three, four or five times his money in a of years. But overall, an interesting transaction, a real truly New York transaction. I think it's worked out for everybody. It's been a win-win. What I love about this guy is the of the spectrum of how he makes money. You have this super visible, high profile, super tall tower on Central Park. And then you have these dilapidated, unloved buildings in the middle of Midtown. Right? Both sides, you could argue the ring building deals even better than 157. Will Krasne (26:20.874) on a risk-adjusted basis, not even close. So as kind of a deal maker yourself and a mogul in training, what is your favorite aspect of Gary Barnett? think it's just the creativity because anyone can see something and say, that's great real estate. That's really not hard. That's not the game. And then anyone else can go to market process and pay the biggest amount of money. Like that's also not hard. What's really amazing and where the value is created is either seeing the value where others don't, or it's being able to say, know, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger famously had a too hard pile, you know. I've worked for some folks, and Gary's one of these guys too, where they say, great, too hard pile. That means no one else is gonna be looking at it, because no one else is gonna either be smart enough or want to incur the brain damage to deal with it. Yeah, we talked about risk tolerance and it seems like he has one of the most extreme kind of stomachs for risk that we've seen in the business, but there's also pain tolerance, right? That's a little bit of a different thing where you're willing to take a certain risk, but you're also willing to grind through 15 years of an assemblage, complex litigation. There's all kinds of crazy stuff. And he goes up against everyone from Bruce Ratner at Atlantic Yards to Steve Roth, one of the scariest men in all of real estate. Hiten Samtani (27:40.462) There's a Trojan horse at 220 Central Park South. We're gonna save that for another episode, but like he messes with everybody all the time And again, he's just a guy. He doesn't have an institution behind him. doesn't have public stock outside of bonds and the taste. I mean, he's got, he's got hoods, but he's got access to a ton of capital, but it's not as if he's got an army of Dartmouth MBAs running around doing analysis for him. Like this is a guy who's, you know, running it. What? He doesn't even use email. It doesn't own a computer. I've been to his office, it's not my... Hiten Samtani (28:12.526) I mean, he gets his emails printed out is the myth. He did try an institutional guy for a bit. He got a guy from Westbrook for a little minute. Didn't really work out. Shocked. And yeah, he convinces the world's wealthiest people to back his capers. I think that's a big part of it as well. Absolutely. we've only just scratched the surface. We've got a lot more to get into. So this is going to be a fun series. For sure. For sure. And because he's really indicative of how New York real estate has changed over the past 30 years. It's from folks like Gary just sitting around a table trying to throw deals together to becoming an international market funded by folks around the globe, both on the equity side, on the debt side, and then also on the end user side. So I've always been fascinated by the shift that I've talked to you about before, Will, like the cowboys, Harry Helmsley, Harry McLeod to the suits, the John Grays and stuff of the world. Gary Barnett is a cowboy who competes with the suits all day and makes it work. I find that really interesting. Yeah, he's one of a kind and only in New York. Or Deer Valley. Hiten Samtani (29:23.394) This has been another episode of the Promote Podcast on Gary Barnett. Obviously we're big fanboys. Gary, if you're listening, please come on and talk about your deals with us. We'll come to you. Welcome to you. Hiten Samtani (29:35.566) Ciao.