Laurence “Larry” Gluck, the founder and longtime leader of major New York landlord Stellar Management, has passed away at age 71 after a battle with ALS.
Gluck died June 13, according to Stellar, which released a statement that praised him as “a visionary leader in the real estate industry.” It stressed that Stellar will continue to be family-run, with Gluck’s wife, Sandra, and his oldest daughter, Amanda, overseeing investments, management and operations at the company. Managing Partners Adam Roman, Matthew Lembo and Ryan Jackson will remain at the helm as well.
Gluck was born in 1953 and founded NoMad-based Stellar Management almost 40 years ago. He and developer Steve Witkoff, whom he worked with at the law firm Dreyer & Traub, partnered to start Stellar in 1985 and settled on its name by combining letters from both of their first names. The firm initially focused on purchasing and constructing apartment buildings in Washington Heights.
Witkoff left the company in 1997 to start his own firm, the Witkoff Group, while Gluck continued to lead Stellar. The firm would often buy properties in the rent-subsidized Mitchell-Lama program and deregulate them, which led to multiple controversies and clashes with tenants at complexes including Independence Plaza in Tribeca and, perhaps most famously, Riverton Houses in Harlem.
Stellar purchased Riverton for $135 million in 2005 with plans to convert more than half of the 1,230 apartments to market-rate units by 2011, but this effort ran into multiple problems amid the Great Recession. The company ultimately lost the building to foreclosure in 2010 after defaulting on its $225 million loan.
This did not spell the end for Stellar, however, with Gluck and the firm enjoying a bit of a comeback in the 2010s. He took on the troubled Tivoli Gardens residential project in Brooklyn with the support of the city, for instance, which provided Stellar with more than $40 million worth of support in exchange for a pledge to keep the development in the Mitchell-Lama program for 30 more years. The company also led a group that purchased a pair of adjacent SoHo properties in 2012 at 161 Sixth Ave. and 233 Spring St., which it developed into the office building now known as 1 SoHo Square.
But the company continued to spar in court with tenants in its residential buildings, with many in the later 2010s accusing Stellar of exaggerating the amount of work it did renovating apartments to justify taking them out of rent regulation.
Stellar’s portfolio now spans more than 12,000 apartments in more than 100 buildings, along with more than 1 million square feet of retail space, more than 2 million square feet of office space and more than 1 million square feet of developments in its pipeline.
Eddie Small , 2024-06-17 18:22:02
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