{"id":166778,"date":"2026-03-17T23:32:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T23:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/166778\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T23:32:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T23:32:00","slug":"shlomi-avdoos-eponymous-development-firm-leans-into-manhattan-commercial-observer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/166778\/","title":{"rendered":"Shlomi Avdoo\u2019s Eponymous Development Firm Leans Into Manhattan \u2013 Commercial Observer"},"content":{"rendered":"

In two decades, Shlomi Avdoo<\/a> has gone from rehabbing Park Slope-area brownstones and developing small-beans projects in the outer reaches of Queens and Brooklyn to developing design-forward, contextually conscious buildings in collaboration with Architectural Digest 100-level talent. Until now, most of Avdoo\u2019s eponymous development company\u2019s work has been in Brooklyn in particular.<\/p>\n

But the firm is leveling up again: With 2 million square feet of residential and mixed-use projects across New York City under its belt and an additional 1 million square feet currently in the pipeline, Avdoo is charging headfirst into the Manhattan market with high-profile, neighborhood-defining condominium developments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

SEE ALSO: Federal Realty Pays $72M for Another Retail Plaza in Southern Maryland<\/a><\/p>\n

Take its Upper East Side project slated for East 71st Street and Second Avenue, a Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA)-designed 22-story tower with interiors by AD100 designer Alyssa Kapito poised for delivery in 2028. Or its 400-foot tower planned for King and Varick streets in the emerging and largely low-slung neighborhood of Hudson Square, or a forthcoming project in Chelsea, both of which do not yet have an architect and interior designer attached to them publicly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To accommodate this growth, the vertically integrated company plans to almost double its design development side from about 30 people to up to 50 in 2026 and move into a new, larger office. At the helm of this flurry of activity sits Avdoo, the man \u2014 a self-described workaholic who wants to deliver buildings as beautiful and unique as they are impactful to their neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t see ourselves as just a developer, but we see ourselves as a curator, as a storyteller. Every project is a unique story,\u201d the 51-year-old Avdoo said, speaking from his firm\u2019s current Manhattan office on West 37th Street. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like every project is a book that\u2019s part of a larger series. And what we\u2019ve learned in the business, and what the business has taught us, is that if you write a great story and they love the book, people are going to want to read the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leaps of faith<\/p>\n

Shlomi Avdoo is an immigrant New York success story. He and his family moved from Bat Yam, a sea town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel, to Forest Hills, Queens, when Avdoo was 10 years old.<\/p>\n

He landed at Queens College where he could be close to his parents, a locksmith and a stay-at-home mom, and still help them with everything they needed, he said. He graduated with an economics degree in 1997 and followed it up with a law degree in 2000 from Touro College. He decided to enroll in law school at the behest of the woman who would later become his sister-in-law, and who had submitted his law school application unbeknownst to him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From his late teens to late 20s, Avdoo worked the Manhattan circuit as an event producer. It taught him that leveling up in your career is often staked on who you know and work with.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Through guys in finance he met while producing events, he got a job as a stockbroker for Wall Street firm GlobeShare, a subsidiary of Laidlaw Global Securities. But it wasn\u2019t for him. He decided to put his law degree to use and opened a practice, Turner & Avdoo Spiegelman & Associates, with his brother-in-law in 2001. The firm focused on real estate transaction law.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even still, Avdoo\u2019s heart wasn\u2019t in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy passion was never in just sitting and reading contracts,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat I found very exciting was the fact that [real estate] felt like it was fast paced.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He liked the aspect of buying and selling, and he wondered why some properties sold so much more quickly than others. This was his light bulb moment: He realized it came down to design.<\/p>\n

Avdoo started flipping properties soon after. Using seed money from friends, he purchased a house in Jamaica, Queens, and renovated it himself. It sold quickly and he was on to the next, renovating 20 to 30 homes, all in Queens, he said. Avdoo got to a place where he could start hiring people to help renovate and sell those homes, and then moved into developing one- to three-family projects. Because he didn\u2019t have much capital behind him, it was important that the properties he was developing sold quickly, and that\u2019s where he began to lean on what\u2019s become Avdoo\u2019s calling card: an attention to detail and good design.<\/p>\n

Then came 2008.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Working in finance, Avdoo had learned enough about mortgages to see that the market was about to collapse. He finished and sold all of his properties, but also knew a market correction was an opportunity for him to once again level up. He set his sights on Brooklyn, and opened an office at the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights a week after Lehman Brothers collapsed. It marked the beginning of Avdoo, the development company, in earnest.<\/p>\n

Taking flight\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since its founding in 2008, Avdoo has flourished in its embrace of design.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat he wants to do is raise the bar of what new construction represents,\u201d said Kapito, who\u2019s working with Avdoo and RAMSA on the East 71st Street project. New construction has become \u201clike airline travel, where it\u2019s so watered down that the experience is just, like, not great. And he wants to bring it back up again.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her experience working with Avdoo, he allows her creative control and a somewhat flexible time frame. \u201cI\u2019ve never been told by another client, \u2018Take your time, get it right.\u2019 He has an appreciation for design that\u2019s super rare.\u201d<\/p>\n

It helps that the company has the chops to see the details through.<\/p>\n

Since its inception, Avdoo has been vertically integrated, meaning everything from design to construction to marketing happens in-house (with outside collaboration from the likes of Kapito). While there are currently about 30 people working on the design development side, Avdoo estimates about 100 people work on its construction side.<\/p>\n

\u201cConstruction is one of our biggest strengths today,\u201d Avdoo said. \u201cOne of the most difficult things for developers is execution and often where developers fail, because they\u2019re not able to execute on schedule and on budget.\u201d When everything happens in-house, he said, things are a lot more seamless.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Shlomi
\n\t\t\tPHOTO: Axel Dupeux\/for Commercial Observer\t\t<\/p>\n

Avdoo\u2019s Bergen development in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, was designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo with interiors by the borough\u2019s own Workstead. Today the 105-condo development, which launched sales in 2024, is over 80 percent sold.<\/p>\n

When Avdoo tapped Escobedo, \u201cshe was just an architect in Mexico City\u201d with a \u201creally small city studio,\u201d Avdoo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIdentifying and working with these emerging architects that are super talented, that maybe some developers move away from working with because their studios are too small,\u201d Avdoo said, \u201cfor us, that is the opportunity.\u201d In 2022, Escobedo was announced as the architect for the forthcoming Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

What Avdoo has learned that what buyers want right now \u2014 on top of good, thoughtful and unique design \u2014 is outdoor space, exposure to light and air, and privacy. Avdoo\u2019s current project at 110 Boerum Place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, a 21-condo building with architecture and interiors by Brent Buck, will offer just that when it\u2019s complete this year. It hit the market two months ago, Avdoo said, and is over 50 percent sold. The company is also at work on a Gowanus, Brooklyn, rental building, its first rental since 2000, designed by Morris Adjmi. Beyond that, the focus is on Manhattan.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a long history of being patient and building strong relationships to acquire properties in super tight environments,\u201d Avdoo said. \u201cToday, Manhattan is arguably the toughest market for available inventory to build, so working with this pipeline feels especially rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building trust<\/p>\n

In Avdoo\u2019s leveling up, it has consistently worked with Valley National Bank to finance its projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c[Shlomi] actually came recommended by someone I knew very well, who asked me a few times to take a risk,\u201d said Christopher Gregg, the bank\u2019s first senior vice president and department head of New York commercial real estate. It\u2019s always a risk working with a new developer, not knowing how honest they are or if they\u2019re capable of executing a project, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That was over a decade ago.<\/p>\n

The risk paid off. Since then, Valley National has worked on a handful of projects with Avdoo, providing an $89 million construction loan for a 100-condo development on St. Marks Place in Brooklyn, a $105 million construction loan for Bergen, a $47 million construction loan for 110 Boerum Place<\/a>, a $52 million purchase loan for East 71st Street, and supporting the $63 million purchase of 68 King Street<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gregg is glad he took his friend\u2019s recommendation. It came from \u201csomeone I knew and trusted, and, over time, I\u2019ve built the same relationship with Shlomi.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gregg also said Avdoo\u2019s wife, Devora, once told him they calculated how many hours a week he spends on projects, and \u201cbasically, she thinks he\u2019s insane. But he loves what he\u2019s doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside of work, Avdoo ferries his four children to various activities and sports practices \u2014 his youngest, 16-year-old twin boys, are very into tennis, he said \u2014 and volunteers with Project Sunshine, a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers into hospitals to play with children with medical needs. The Avdoos live on the south shore of Long Island, but when the twins go off to college, the couple plans to relocate to the East 71st Street project.<\/p>\n

Avdoo said he tries to give back not only in his personal life but also in his professional life. For him, the reward is not how much he can make on a project, but creating homes for people in a market that he doesn\u2019t foresee having enough market-rate or affordable units to meet demand anytime soon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the most rewarding thing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is the driver that makes [me] wake up in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In two decades, Shlomi Avdoo has gone from rehabbing Park Slope-area brownstones and developing small-beans projects in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[68407,68408,68409,75,84,83,9,24,63,31206,68410],"class_list":["post-166778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-110-boerum-place","tag-alyssa-kapito","tag-christopher-gregg","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-robert-a-m-stern","tag-shlomi-avdoo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}