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The Kushners’ Real Estate Empire Is Now Worth More Than Trump’s

While Jared Kushner moved to D.C. to advise former president Trump and then to Miami to pursue private equity, his family’s real estate business quietly prospered in his absence—rebuilding a portfolio that’s now more valuable than his father-in-law’s.

Nicole Kushner Meyer & Laurent Morali / Kushner Companies

Nicole Kushner Meyer & Laurent Morali / Kushner Companies

In 2018, the Kushner family was at a turning point. One year into Jared Kushner’s tenure as senior advisor at the White House to his father-in-law Donald Trump, the family’s real estate business, Kushner Companies, was facing battles on multiple fronts.

Rumors swirled about possible investigations into influence from Chinese and Qatari investors, which the firm strenuously denied. In its home state of New Jersey, its high-profile luxury apartment development in Journal Square was stalled, with the company filing a lawsuit against Jersey City and its mayor alleging that they were putting the project in default due to “political animus.” The greatest immediate threat lay in Manhattan, where it faced a looming wall of debt—$1.2 billion—coming due by February 2019 on its marquee asset: a 50.5% stake in 666 Fifth Avenue, a 41-story office tower in Midtown.

Six years later, the Kushners have turned things around. One of two 64-story towers at the Jersey City complex topped out this summer. A 30-story, 420-unit apartment tower in the heart of Miami, their second development in Florida, was completed in early October. A few days later, OpenAI leased more than half of the office space at their historic Puck Building in lower Manhattan (the ChatGPT maker will pay $140 per square foot, a massive jump from the $31 paid by the previous tenant, New York University, according to a person familiar with the lease). Meanwhile, the firm sold a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue—now called 660 Fifth Avenue—later in 2018, resolving its debt problems. As for possible investigations, none went anywhere.

All of this has helped the Kushners revitalize their New Jersey real estate company. Forbes dug into dozens of debt filings, property deeds and financial disclosures and spoke with 15 real estate experts and brokers to value the family’s fortune for the first time since 2016. Forbes now estimates Kushner Companies to be worth $2.9 billion, nearly triple the $1 billion it was worth at the time Trump was elected. It’s also more valuable than Trump’s $2.2 billion real estate portfolio.

As a whole, the Kushners are worth an estimated $7.1 billion—up from $1.8 billion in 2016—a sum that includes Kushner Companies, stakes in eight personal properties worth at least $100 million and Jared and Josh’s investment firms. Family patriarch Charles and his wife Seryl together own 20% of the nearly $3 billion (market value) real estate firm, with the rest split between their four kids: Jared, Josh, Dara and Nicole. In addition to his 20% stake in Kushner Companies, Jared owns nascent private equity firm Affinity Partners, which is backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund—enough to be worth at least $900 million, according to Forbes estimates. His brother Josh, who refused to vote for Trump and is married to model Karlie Kloss, has meanwhile made his own fortune as a well-regarded venture investor. Forbes values his stake in his venture capital firm Thrive Capital, which scored with early investments in Instagram, Spotify and OpenAI, at an estimated $3.5 billion. He also owns a $40 million penthouse in the family’s Puck Building, where Thrive is headquartered and where OpenAI just signed its lease, plus homes in Malibu and Miami. Not only is he by far the wealthiest Kushner, but he’s also one of America’s 400 richest people.

 

Photo by Patrick McMullan / Getty Images

Josh, Charles and Jared Kushner in 2014 at an event for The New York Observer, a tabloid Jared owned until he joined the Trump administration. Photo by Patrick McMullan / Getty Images

 

While the two sons have captured plenty of headlines, the rebound of the family real estate business has gone largely under the radar. After Jared left the company to join Trump’s administration in 2017, his father Charles, 70 (who still consults on projects but has no title), handed the reins to non-family member and former investment banker Laurent Morali and later to his younger daughter Nicole, 41, who now run the company together as CEO and president, respectively.

The low-profile pair have gone out of their way to avoid the intense media scrutiny the firm received during Trump’s presidency, which the family has said interfered with its business dealings. Instead, Kushner Companies has focused on unraveling its riskiest bets (mostly made while Jared was in charge) and crystallizing a new, more streamlined strategy. That has meant selling most of its big-ticket office properties and assets in New York City, which Morali calls inhospitable for business, and going back to the apartment business that made the family so successful in the first place—returning to its New Jersey roots and beyond.

“Kushner remains focused on expanding our multifamily apartment portfolio of over 27,000 units in 15 states,” Morali told Forbes in an emailed statement. (None of the family would agree to speak with Forbes on the record.)

Known for its extensive New Jersey portfolio before its forays into New York City, the company is now much more geographically diverse. Forbes now estimates that just under half the value of the company’s real estate is concentrated in apartments in the Baltimore-Washington metro area and the Sun Belt, where it has bought nearly 10,000 apartments since 2021. It has a similar chunk in New Jersey, where it’s been developing and converting a mall, hotels and offices it’s owned for years. Less than 10% of its holdings are still in New York City, where the value is concentrated in just one key asset: the Puck Building.

“It’s an obvious pivot they made in terms of investment strategy,” says Jeffrey Otteau, chief economist of valuation and advisory service Otteau Group and a veteran of New Jersey real estate.

Holocaust survivors and refugees from Belarus, Joseph and Rae Kushner arrived in New York in 1949 with their young daughter Linda. The couple had three more children in the U.S.: Charles (named after his mother’s brother, who died during the Holocaust), Murray and Esther.

Around 1954, the year Charles was born, the Modern Orthodox Jewish family moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey alongside a group of other refugees who made fortunes in real estate and became known as “The Holocaust Builders.” That’s where Joseph got his start building apartments, with Charles often accompanying him to construction sites. At his peak, Joseph owned and managed some 4,000 apartments in New Jersey.

After Charles graduated from law school at Hofstra University in 1979, he joined his father in real estate. But he wanted to start buying up, not just building, properties. He convinced his father to set up Kushner Companies together in 1985—but Joseph died from a stroke shortly after they acquired their first property, leaving Charles to work alone. (His brother Murray, meanwhile, had started his own real estate firm, which Forbes is not valuing.)

Over time, Charles also started buying apartment buildings in New York, Pennsylvania and Florida. By 2004, Kushner Companies had a portfolio of 25,000 units and had become one of New Jersey’s largest apartment owners.

That was also the year that Charles pled guilty to filing false tax returns, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission regarding campaign contributions and retaliating against a cooperating witness. He was convicted and sent to prison the next year, with his longtime attorney friend, Alan Hammer, temporarily taking over the business. Charles was released in 2006, and he soon passed the reins to his oldest child, Jared, then 26, while maintaining an active role.

Jared was ready to take the firm in a new direction. His strategy would mirror the one his future father-in-law Donald Trump had already used to find success when he pivoted from Queens to Manhattan: taking his father’s relatively sleepy, New Jersey-based empire and expanding it with flashy projects in New York City. For Jared, that meant a fascination with transforming old office buildings into hyper-modern complexes. It also represented a shift away from the near-myopic focus on apartments that had worked well for over half a century.

Jared’s era kicked off with the January 2007 purchase of the 41-story office tower 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, paid for with $1.75 billion in debt. It was the most expensive office purchase in the country at the time, with the debt co-guaranteed by food importing magnate George Gellert, a longtime business partner of Charles.

The idea was to create more value by splitting the building up into office and retail space—and indeed, an appraisal of the property at the time suggested it could be worth as much as $3 billion. The Kushners bought another office building in Chicago soon after.

In September of that year, the firm got rid of nearly 17,000 apartments—including some properties that had been built by Joseph Kushner—selling them to multifamily firm Morgan Properties and insurance giant AIG for $1.9 billion. Hammer, the firm’s then-acting chairman, told industry publication Yield PRO that they wanted to cut down on the hassle of managing a vast residential portfolio.

“[Charles] was convinced, as I understand the story, by Jared—because he was coming out of jail—that he needed to have a higher profile and get out of the ‘B’ apartment business. It’s not as glamorous,” says Mitchell Morgan, the billionaire owner of Morgan Properties. “They paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, one building, and I paid $1.9 billion for 16,800 units. It was the top of the market when we bought it. But their occupancy went down, and mine stayed in the nineties.”

In a 2018 interview with CNN, Charles had a different take: “I pushed Jared to do the deal,” he said, calling the purchase “bad timing and bad judgment.”

Whoever was responsible, the bet came at a terrible time. When the financial crisis hit, the Kushners’ projections crumbled. Manhattan office rents collapsed in 2008 and the building’s occupancy fell to 89%, 9% below the loan underwriters’ projections. By 2011, its net operating income had fallen by nearly half and the company was close to defaulting on the debt. The Kushners offset the damage by selling the property’s retail space for a combined $1.1 billion between 2008 and 2012 and refinancing the office space.

 

Photo by Stephen Chernin / Stringer / Getty Images
In his 2022 memoir, Jared Kushner called salvaging his purchase of 666 Fifth Ave the “biggest challenge” of his business career.Photo by Stephen Chernin / Stringer / Getty Images

 

By that point, Jared started to hedge his bets. While the firm was still purchasing office space, including a six-building portfolio in Brooklyn for $240 million in 2013, it also snapped up thousands of older apartments in six Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states between 2011 and 2016.

By the time he started to work on Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, the family business looked very different from the one he took over. Kushner Companies owned stakes in 20,000 apartments—5,000 less than the end of Charles’ reign in 2005 and more than half of which had been bought in the past five years—plus 13 million square feet of office, industrial and retail space across six states.

Jared’s move to D.C. ushered in the start of the firm’s next chapter. With Nicole having only recently joined the company in 2015 after a decade in creative services at Ralph Lauren, the family elevated Morali, who’d joined eight years earlier, to president in 2016.

He started off with some clean up. Morali hired executives from Morgan Stanley and a Blackstone subsidiary, giving the firm a more institutional edge. Then he unloaded weak assets in New York City, including Kushner’s stake in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ once-iconic headquarters, which it had owned for less than two years. It also sold a 99-year-lease at 666 Fifth Avenue to Brookfield Asset Management in August 2018 for an up-front payment of $1.3 billion. While the family never achieved its ambitions for the tower—it had at one point proposed razing the building and replacing it with a 1,400-foot-tall luxury skyscraper, but the idea failed to attract investors—it did end up making back most of its initial investment. The Kushners still own the fee interest in the long-term ground lease on the tower, which Forbes estimates is worth close to zero.

The deal freed the firm up to get back to basics. It began developing property again in New Jersey. And it started moving down the East Coast, starting with a 2019 deal for 6,030 apartments around the D.C. and Baltimore areas for a reported $1.1 billion. “They ultimately did a 180,” adds Morgan.

That next summer, Morali sat the team down. With the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates to near-zero amid the Covid-19 pandemic, he’d decided it was time to expand. Eyeing the shifting demographics and lower tax rates in the Sun Belt, he set a goal: sell off older assets while scooping up newer ones in the South and Southeast—but not in the regions experiencing the biggest real estate booms. Ultra-hot markets like Nashville and Austin were overrun by institutional real estate investors like Blackstone and Starwood, each at least three dozen times the size of Kushner. But the firm could compete in secondary markets, like the suburbs of Memphis or Houston. The team brainstormed about 20 regions to target and sent out representatives to scour them for deals.

Author: Monica Hunter-Hart and Giacomo Tognini, Forbes Staff

Source: Forbes Magazine:::

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