In June 2019, Samantha Rudin Earls met Kathy Hochul, then lieutenant governor, at a lunch of the Association for a Better New York’s Women’s Group, an arm of the civic organization founded by her grandfather Lew Rudin.
“She spoke about her career in the private sector and what she’d done in the political sector, and she was just very humble and supportive, explaining how she navigated all that as a woman,” Samantha said. “We formed a relationship.”
At the time, no one could know Hochul would go on to be governor. But befriending political figures at all levels and all stages of their careers is a Rudin trademark, one of the habits that’s kept the family at the top of New York City real estate for a century.
The Rudin third generation — 70-year-old Bill and his 72-year-old cousin Eric — turned over operations to the fourth — Bill’s kids, Samantha and Michael — a little more than a year ago. So far, the new co-CEOs appear to observe this and other important Rudin rules. The first is maintaining a firm culture and a singular focus on Manhattan. The second is understanding that the job they signed up for involves extensive civic commitments (like texting with a lieutenant governor) and a time-consuming and often frustrating involvement in government and politics. The third: keeping tenants happy.
But much has changed in 100 years at the firm, so Samantha and Michael have new rules to write too. They have to modernize the way the firm operates and work to reposition their assets — 14 office buildings and 17 residential properties worth about $5 billion according to Forbes — turning some office buildings into residences, making their office buildings attractive to the new generation of workers and navigating the anti-real estate politics so prevalent in the city.
Their May meeting with The Real Deal was the first time the two generations of CEOs had ever sat together for an interview, signaling their commitment to keeping on.
“The most important thing was making sure that we have and had a smooth transition of leadership to the next generation,” Bill said. “You look right now at JPMorgan or Disney, or at other family-run real estate companies, and some of them get it right, but there is a lot of angst.”
Staying in their lane
The Rudins are only one on a long list of family-owned and run real estate companies that bought buildings in New York City without debt and held onto them for generations.
Louis Rudinsky, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, bought the family’s first building in 1902. He suggested that Samuel Rudin and his brothers create Rudin in 1925 to manage this and other properties they’d accumulated. Sam’s sons, Lew and Jack, gained stature at the company, putting up 8 building in the 1960s and 1970s. They took over the firm in 1975 on the death of their father, beginning the tradition of two-person leadership.
Jack concentrated on day-to-day operations and construction. Lew took care of leasing and financing and became the public face of the company. “They mostly stayed in their lanes,” Bill said.
In the third generation, Eric oversaw operations and construction and Bill specialized in office leasing and financing. Bill also took on Lew’s role of representing the company. They worked together on development. “There was more overlap with our generation,” Eric says.
“Some of them get it right, but there is a lot of angst.”
Other members have worked in the business too including Samantha and Michael’s aunt Beth Rudin DeWoody and cousin Madeleine Rudin, both of whom were executive vice presidents.
The fourth time around, the division of labor splits mostly by asset class. Samantha is on the residential side of the company and Michael on the office towers, all but one of which are in Manhattan.
As Manhattan people, they have no interest in trying the supposedly easier markets outside the city, though they have dabbled: Sam’s first development was in the Bronx; the Rudins sold it a couple of years before the pandemic. They acquired a building in Boston through a tax-free exchange and eventually sold that too and have also tried out Brooklyn with the Dock 72 development at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“I think we understand the ecosystem we live in,” Bill said.
Conversions and consultants
Just before Covid, Samantha, now 41, led one change effort: enlisting outside help. Rudin hired a company to overhaul its marketing strategy. Longtime family friend Amy Rose came in as a consultant to reevaluate their residential portfolio. One outcome was updating their name to just Rudin from Rudin Management Corp.
Samantha and Michael together are reevaluating their portfolio, since they understand that companies will pay high rents for an office on Park Avenue but may not lease space one or two blocks to the east.
In a sign that they understood the moment, the Rudins sold 55 Broad Street to Silverstein and Metro Loft for a residential conversion in July 2023, just before the CEO transition, even though its transformation into the city’s first advanced tech building was one of Bill’s most important early accomplishments.
They are now doing their own conversions. The siblings are jointly overseeing the work to turn the office buildings at 845 Third Avenue and 355 Lexington Avenue to apartments. Because of the city’s new City of Yes rezoning, they can add floors to the properties, but planning has just begun.
Michael, 39, is figuring out the new rules for luring and keeping office tenants — namely, adding amenities and broadcasting them to potential tenants. This began after Covid closures virtually emptied out 3 Times Square, and Rudin responded with a major remodeling including a new lobby and a full amenity floor that worked to get occupancy back to 65 percent.
But it goes further.
One Rudin legend is about signing Blackstone as a tenant. In the late 1980s, not long after launching the finance firm, founders Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson bumped into Lew and Jack Rudin on the street. Schwarzman complained how hard it was to start the company, especially finding office space, and Lew and Jack leased them their first office at 345 Park Avenue.
The Rudins’ average residential tenant stays for slightly more than 20 years and the typical commercial tenant for 30. No one illustrates the connection better than Blackstone, whose $1.2 trillion under management makes it the world’s largest alternative asset manager and the biggest tenant in the Rudin’s headquarters building.
“The Rudins have had a determinative impact on Blackstone since signing our first lease for 345 Park Ave in 1988,” Schwarzman told TRD. “They are honest, straightforward, flexible and helpful. You know that the Rudins are on your team. It made us want to grow our business here, stay here.”
Last July, the firm added another 250,000 square feet at 345 Park Avenue, taking up 20 floors and raising their total space to just over 1 million square feet — half the building.
This spring, Michael tried out a new perk: pretzel day. Four carts with fancy dipping sauces set up around the lobby, heating and serving soft pretzels. It was great, a friend at Blackstone texted Michael, who went down to see for himself.
There, he saw tenant service in action. Blackstone President Jon Gray was in the lobby with a pretzel in his hand, even though he was in a rush and didn’t have time to wait on line. A security guard had given his own pretzel to the bigwig.
Gray, who makes 60-second LinkedIn video updates for his followers, smiled for Michael’s camera. (The video was never published.)
“That’s the point about marketing ourselves and what has changed,” Michael said. “We used to never do any proactive outward marketing,” Michael said. (He got the security guard a replacement pretzel.)
It might seem new-fangled, but this is chip-off-the-old-block stuff, said Mary Ann Tighe, longtime CEO of CBRE’s New York region and a broker who has probably negotiated more big leases than anyone in the city. “The old families know not to be greedy. Tenants are precious. If it’s a quality tenant who pays the rent, you fight like hell to keep that tenant for all eternity.”
Civic leadership
Every one of the family real estate firms is heavily involved in philanthropic and cultural institutions and plugged in with elected officials.
“The Rudin family is archetypical of those families of wealth who have always been strong supporters of the city, irrespective of the political leadership at any particular time,” Carl Weisbrod, the longtime city official who chaired the City Planning Commission under Mayor Bill de Blasio, said.
The list of Rudin-supported institutions is particularly long. Sam had been an avid long-distance runner and when he died in 1975, the family became a sponsor of the New York City Marathon. Samantha, who originally wanted to work in the theater business, is on the board of Roundabout Theatre Company and Subject Matter and has taken her father’s seat on the board of the Al Smith Foundation. Michael is on the boards of the First Tee of Metropolitan New York and the Aspen Art Museum. The day they were interviewed by The Real Deal, Samantha had spent the morning at an ABNY session with Attorney General Letitia James and Michael had just returned from an executive committee meeting at REBNY.
They started early: Michael and Samantha remember as children their mother taking them to the Incarnation Children’s Center in Harlem where Jack had been a board member. The AIDS epidemic was at its height and the center primarily cared for babies born with the disease. “It was a very bad situation,” Samantha said. “And so you develop an understanding of how important it is to care for the community and also that we’re fortunate.”
People who have watched Bill closely say what he does better than many others is make sure he knows politicians and government officials at all levels. He says it is as important to know the staff as it is their bosses.
“It’s part of the job description and I learned from watching Jack and Lew,” Bill adds. “My dad always said, you support your people as they go up and you support them as they go down.”
Bill even still enables the relationship between Samantha and Gov. Hochul: Once, when Samantha was helping set up for her daughter’s soccer game on a windy day, the governor called. Bill took over her job of securing the goal posts against the gusts, leaving Samantha free to chat.
When a real estate company’s assets are all in one place, the political climate can break a business, as so many owners of rent-stabilized buildings whose values have plummeted after the 2019 rent law reforms have learned. But there can be an upside as well. Bill called individual council members to rally support for Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes rezoning. While its provisions will speed conversion of Rudin office buildings, he also worked to find compromises on issues that had no impact on his company, sources with knowledge of the negotiations said.
As Lew Rudin once put it: “The secret of my relationship with the political world is, I never ask them for anything. So I owe them nothing. Most of the time, they owe me something.”
Next next gen
No one knows if the Rudins and the other families will be able to ride the latest waves, but they have surprised skeptics before.
In 1997, a New York Times piece headlined “The Real Estate Royals: End of the Line?” wondered whether the big real estate families would soon be extinct.
“Some analysts believe that Manhattan’s prime real estate, and the social and political power that goes with it, will soon be owned not by the families but by real-estate investment trusts,” the story read.
If that was a challenge, the Rudins were up for it. When asked to name the biggest accomplishment of the third generation, Bill doesn’t say reviving downtown after the 2001 terrorist attacks, holding onto Blackstone or doing the massive Greenwich Lane condominium development. It was the succession, he said.
When Bill was young, he did some work in movies but decided to return to New York to join the real estate business. Sam said he shouldn’t go to college and offered to put a desk in his office, so he could learn on the job. Going to New York University instead remains one of his biggest regrets.
Samantha isn’t making that mistake with the fifth generation.
Tighe remembers going to 345 Park for a major meeting in 2017, when someone asked if she wanted a tour of the just remodeled space.
In Samantha’s office was a desk for her daughter, who was “working,” holding a fake cell phone to her ear. When Tighe entered, she put her finger to her mouth, hushing her visitor as if she needed quiet for a business call. Michael’s children are also around the business a lot, Bill noted, and Samantha’s daughter has since outgrown the desk. But the action spoke volumes.
“It’s not just the DNA, it’s the training,” Tighe said.