Real estate has been on Adam Gordon's mind at least since graduate school, when he did extremely well in a class focused on the industry. One of his first jobs after getting his MBA was in real estate investment banking at the now collapsed Bear Stearns, although he soon found he did not enjoy the place very much, to put it mildly.
"I realized very quickly that I didn't want a miserable life with miserable people providing advice no one needed or wanted, that no one seemed to have any conviction for," he said. "I went off on my own and became a real estate developer."
Gordon today works on some of the highest-profile industrial real estate projects in the city as managing partner at Chelsea-based Wildflower Ltd. These include a film and TV production studio in Astoria backed by actor Robert De Niro and the Amazon-leased Brooklyn Logistics Center in East New York. But his initial developments took place far outside the city, as he focused on mixed-use renovations in Wicker Park, Chicago, and outlet stores for luxury fashion brands in Manchester, Vermont.
He stayed in New York while working on those deals and switched to more of a residential focus after renovating his own loft in SoHo and selling it for a healthy profit. But he soon found himself more interested in the generally less glamorous world of industrial real estate given the city's ever-increasing demand for storage space.
"I saw urban self-storage begin to rise as an asset class, and the institutions didn't understand it because it was in lower-income, often nonwhite neighborhoods, which at that time could not attract institutional capital," he said. "I felt I was very early in the business."
His partnership with De Niro on Wildflower Studios stemmed from a friendship that started more than 20 years ago, when one of Gordon's sons happened to play the drums next to one of De Niro's sons at the Upper East Side's Diller-Quaile School of Music. They have been working together on their studio project for years, and it is now on track to open later this summer on 19th Avenue by the Astoria waterfront.
The city has seen a major boom in studio projects lately, and several more are on their way. But Gordon is not concerned about Wildflower suffering due to a glut of studios oversaturating the city.
He described most studios as fairly depressing places with "awful food served on steam tables" and said he's confident that the quality of Wildflower would make it stand out from the pack. He compared it to luxury residential buildings like 150 Charles St. and 15 Central Park West, noting that the best properties in the city across asset classes tend to do well.
"There is no place that a filmmaker, a producer, an editor, a union driver would rather be than the environment that we're creating for them at Wildflower Studios," he said. "Will marginal studios flourish? That I don't know, but I'm quite certain that the best studios—us, Steiner—will do well for many, many years."