Stuart Saft is a partner and New York Real Estate Practice Group Leader at the law firm Holland & Knight, and he co-chairs the firm’s Global Condominium Development and Conversion Group and formerly co-chaired the Hospitality, Resort and Timeshare Group. He represents owners in the planning, acquisition, formation and operation of luxury hotels and condominium projects in New York, those converting office space into non-office use, the developers of more than a dozen residential projects under construction, and has formed dozens of leasehold condominiums, permitting nonprofits to obtain tax exemptions, among other matters.

He has served as board chair of the Council of New York Cooperatives & Condominiums for nearly four decades, chaired the New York City Workforce Investment Board for 15 years, as well as serving on the Board of the National Cooperative Bank for 12 years including 3 years as chair.

How did you get started in the real estate industry?

I never intended on practicing real estate law and became involved quite by accident. I graduated from Columbia Law School and planned on becoming a corporate lawyer. After the Army, I went to a small Wall Street firm and did corporate and securities law, mergers and acquisitions. At that time, Wall Street firms did not do real estate. About four years after I started working, a client asked me to represent him in making a second mortgage on a shopping center. He came back over the next few weeks and had me do an assortment of relatively large real estate transactions. At one of the closings, I met a former Yale tax professor who was inventing the real estate tax shelter, and he was impressed by my work and hired me to do his acquisitions, financing and syndication documents. By the end of the year, I was doing real estate 100% of the time. While practicing, I also started writing articles and then books about real estate to help the next generation of lawyers to practice within the real estate field.

Walk us through one of your challenging transactions.

I represented the group that purchased the Crown Building at 57th and Fifth Avenue in NYC and converted it into Aman New York which included a super luxury Hotel, Residences, Retail and a Jazz Club. The transaction involved negotiating with the original purchaser for my client to acquire a joint venture interest, then analyzing an office building, determining the most efficient way to split it up without demolishing it, and executing dividing the building into pieces.

We had to negotiate a Development Agreement between the owner of the retail portion of the building and my client, who was going to reconfigure the upper portions and part of the first floor and basement, including replacing all of the elevators and filling in shafts, to creating separate entrances for the four main portions of the property and also identifying how the elevators and stairs would service the different sections of the building. This also involved planning how the internal demolition would proceed as well as the construction of the interior. We then negotiated a Condominium Declaration and By-Laws initially separating the building into the retail portion and the upper portion which would later be divided into the hotel, amenities spaces, and the residences. We then prepared a Condominium Offering Plan, which was submitted to, and accepted by, the Attorney General so the residences could be sold. The Development Agreement and the Condominium Declaration were modified and amended several times as the construction proceeded and the joint venture partners wanted to make changes. We also had to plan for the operation of the upper portions of the building and the cooperation of the various owners. As is obvious from the above, we had detailed plans for the entire project, but we had not planned for Donald Trump’s escalator trip into history. When we planned the work, we had not considered that our across the street neighbor who lived and worked in Trump Tower would make his first successful run for President. Because we could not use 57th Street and Fifth Avenue for the construction vehicles, the plan was to use 56th street. However, when President Trump announced his campaign, the police and the Secret Service closed 56th Street east of the Fifth Avenue. However, the city officials, the federal officials and the president’s campaign team cooperated making what appeared to be a potential construction nightmare, into a relatively simple solution.

You have experienced a number of real estate cycles. How is 2025 different than previous years?

Yes, I have been through at least six cycles and when you got to the downturn, it was obvious. They all have one similarity (for me at least); the recession starts in New York first and ends in New York before the rest of the country. In fact, by the time the economy is pounding the rest of the country, New York is seeing the green shoots of a recovery. 2025 has been an unusual year. Although in January I was very optimistic that we were going to have a strong economy in 2025 and 2026, the Tariff situation in April caused some pessimism to creep into my prognosis. I am now concerned as to which way the economy is heading.

What do you consider to be one of the biggest challenges facing the real estate industry today?

In general, the biggest problem is the lack of housing development which causes the supply to shrink while the demand grows. At the present time, the most common solution is price controls, which never work. If the supply of housing increased substantially, then the cost of housing would go down and families would have the money to do more things, which, under economic theory, would grow the economy. Price controls create a distortion in the economy and people hold onto real estate they do not need. For some reason many schools have been teaching that capitalism is bad, but capitalism is not a zero sum game where limited resources are controlled by a few, capitalism grows the resources so more people can share in it; capitalism produces more wealth so more people could have more. But the truth is, it is restrictions placed on the economy, business, and individuals by unfunded mandates, that have made the economy stagnate.

In your opinion, what are some solutions to the issues you mention above?

I think we need to create huge factory zones in the Northeast and Midwest and produce every kind of product that we need in the U.S. While building the factory towns, high-speed rail systems should be placed between the factory zones so that people and products can quickly and inexpensively move across the areas with a smaller carbon footprint than trucks. We have to reduce the supply chain to just North and Central America. Bringing the supply chain back from Asia make it more cost effective and will reduce the control China has over our economy. This could take two or three decades to accomplish, but we need to start somewhere. We also have to make these factory zones and the new transportation systems union free to speed the proceeds and reduce the costs.

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