Wallace told Forbes<\/a> in 2008 that, had he been given the chance to negotiate, he would have asked for $30 million. However, according to his son Brendan Wallace, the eminent domain declaration left him no choice but to accept the $12 million offered by the Empire State Development Corporation, the state\u2019s economic development agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, that lot, along with several adjacent others, is the site of the New York Times Building.\u00a0<\/p>\n The younger Wallace, 44, is the founder and CEO of Fifth Wall<\/a>, which bills itself as \u201cthe largest investment firm focused on technology for the built environment.\u201d Since its inception, the firm has received commitments of approximately $3.1 billion from roughly 115 limited partners, including CBRE, Hilton, Hines, Marriott, Public Storage, Related Companies and Starwood.<\/p>\n Wallace recalls walking around the city as a child with his father, visiting his father\u2019s properties and developing an early obsession with land in the process. (Stratford Wallace died in 2022 at age 85.)<\/p>\n \u201cLand is the input to the entire economy, and the one asset they\u2019re not making more of,\u201d said Wallace. \u201cAnd, it\u2019s anti-inflationary. If you look at land values, they have outpaced basically every other measure of nominal and real growth.\u201d<\/p>\n The Los Angeles-based Wallace, a sports enthusiast and history buff, was a newlywed of three weeks as of his late September conversation with Commercial Observer. With degrees in political science and economics from Princeton and an MBA from Stanford, he is also a veteran of Goldman Sachs and Blackstone<\/a> who could have worked in any industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n But, from his earliest days, there was little doubt that his future would find him closely connected to real estate.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Commercial Observer: Congratulations on your recent wedding. Where did you and your wife meet?<\/p>\n Brendan Wallace: She\u2019s a big extreme sports athlete, and we met on a mountaineering trip. I have a ski house in Park City, Utah, and I have a group of friends I go backcountry skiing with. It was a chance encounter on one of those trips.<\/p>\n Where are you from originally?<\/p>\n I was born and raised on East 91st Street in Manhattan.<\/p>\n Talk about your earliest exposure to real estate.<\/p>\n In the late 1970s, my father and his brother started buying run-down real estate in Times Square: nail salons, a kung fu studio, a Chinese restaurant. Times Square built up around them. I have a deep fascination with land. It\u2019s an opportunity hiding in plain sight that people don\u2019t think about.<\/p>\n When my father bought this real estate, he didn\u2019t have the money to develop it. They were run-down buildings. So, he went to a handful of developers and said, \u201cI\u2019m going to lease you the ground, but I\u2019m never selling the ground.\u201d He basically converted a bunch of old, run-down assets into ground leases in Times Square.<\/p>\n Tell me about the Times building site.<\/p>\n It was pretty run-down. New York City exercised eminent domain to condemn the property as blighted, and they basically gifted it to the New York Times to build their tower.<\/p>\n My dad fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court<\/a>, and lost. The site was underdeveloped, but saying something is blighted and should therefore be condemned, and that the public sector should use its authority to coerce control of land, he viewed that as an abuse of power.\u00a0<\/p>\n [In 2003, Stratford Wallace told correspondent Mike Wallace \u2014 no relation \u2014 on \u201c60 Minutes<\/a>\u201d that the site was \u201cnot blighted property.\u201d]<\/p>\n When you think about it now, did watching that happen have any effect on how you conduct your business?<\/p>\n In one way, yes; in another way, no. I\u2019ve always been fascinated by how cities use eminent domain as an instrument of urban development and how it can lend itself to overreach. But what I do think it instilled in me is a really deep appreciation for land.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you look at GDP growth and land value appreciation, land consistently outpaces it because it\u2019s basic economics that in a world of growing productivity, value accrues to the scarce asset. Land across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal \u2014 the hub for the tri-state area to enter the most important city in the U.S. \u2014 is extremely valuable land.\u00a0<\/p>\n My dad loved the history of New York City. When I was a kid, I would go with him to collect rent, and he would point out buildings, and who did what, and who bought what when. That lore, that mythology of real estate, is something I always loved. So, I wanted to be in real estate ever since I was a kid. My dad shaped that in me. Real estate is in my blood.\u00a0<\/p>\n When I graduated from Stanford, I got a job at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, but I really wanted to be a real estate person. I told them I wouldn\u2019t be joining the firm unless I could be in the real estate group. They promptly informed me that\u2019s not how it works, and I was like, \u201cWell, that\u2019s how it\u2019s going to work for me.\u201d So they put me in the real estate group.\u00a0<\/p>\n After Goldman Sachs, you worked at Blackstone with Jon Gray, who is now the company\u2019s president. What was that like?<\/p>\n I worked in the real estate private equity group around the time Jon took over and worked on the buyout of Sam Zell\u2019s company, Equity Office Properties Trust, in 2007. [Zell, who died in 2023, sold the 573-property portfolio to Blackstone for $39 billion.]\u00a0<\/p>\n I learned an enormous amount from Jon. He applied a technocratic precision to the real estate industry I had never experienced before. That was profound for me.<\/p>\n I moved to Los Angeles to help sell off those [Equity Office Properties] assets, then that segued into the buyout of Hilton Hotels, which was the high-water mark of the bull market cycle. Because, right after the buyout of Hilton, the market crashed.\u00a0<\/p>\n What was the most important thing you learned from Jon?<\/p>\n The thesis behind the Equity Office Properties buyout was that the price of the public company was less than the price of the individual assets if you sold them off. So, you could buy wholesale and sell retail.\u00a0<\/p>\n That arbitrage, that asymmetry, existed in a very temporary context, and it was a product of the dynamics of public REITs. Jon Gray very astutely saw that. His view was that these assets would trade on a per-pound basis eventually. And, sure enough, they did. Seeing someone articulate that so clearly and be so committed to that vision really impressed 23-year-old me.\u00a0<\/p>\n It impressed on me that while we love to believe that markets are efficient, even at the largest, most institutional scale, they can, in the short term, be extremely inefficient, and the shrewdest minds are those that identify the eventual collapse of those asymmetries and the reversion to parity, and get in front of it. That was the lesson I really took away from the Equity Office trade.\u00a0<\/p>\n At Fifth Wall, we\u2019ve been very good at identifying new asset classes before they become new asset classes, and that\u2019s because there\u2019s this temporary moment in time where institutional real estate investors don\u2019t see something as real estate. They see it as tech, or as a flash in the pan, or as something to dismiss. But it always converges to being real estate, and a lot of value is created. I\u2019ve borrowed some of that from Jon.\u00a0<\/p>\n I also should mention that one of my closest mentors is [Starwood Capital Group Chairman and CEO] Barry Sternlicht, and he taught me a lot about the power of willing something into existence. That\u2019s been the hallmark of his career. It\u2019s different than what I learned from Jon, but it\u2019s more a point about individual agency and will \u2014 that if you will something, you can actualize it. I don\u2019t think anyone has done more to actualize new asset classes in the industry than Barry.\u00a0<\/p>\n We sit between those two things: having a Blackstone-informed technocratic vision of markets, but also a view of the power of agency, vision and risk-taking at particular moments in time. Those two things go hand in hand. That\u2019s the art and the science of the real estate industry.<\/p>\n That said, talk about how you started creating companies.<\/p>\n Identified was the first company I launched. That was in 2010, when social media exploded, and people realized that its true power is its underlying data.\u00a0<\/p>\n Myself and another classmate identified that you could use that data to do something that had never before been possible, which is target jobs to people that were previously very hard to target jobs to. So, if a hospital wants a labor and delivery nurse, or a trucking company wants a truck driver, they\u2019re very hard to identify. They\u2019re not on LinkedIn.\u00a0<\/p>\n But we figured out that you could identify them on social media, and we built the largest platform to port targeted ads into social media and deliver relevant job opportunities to blue-collar, semi-skilled workers. We raised a very big venture round, around $22.5 million, while we were still students, and had a team off campus. We were growing it very quickly, and then Workday, the big public enterprise software company, decided they wanted a recruiting solution, and they made us an amazing offer. So we sold it in a stock deal three years after we built it.<\/p>\n Then me and the same co-founder saw Uber taking off in San Francisco, and I thought it was one of the most brilliant applications of technology to terrestrial space: how we use technology to actually make our physical lives better. My co-founder was Spanish, and he was like, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we copy it and launch it in Spain before they get there?\u201d And that\u2019s exactly what we did.\u00a0<\/p>\n We put together our own money, hired a team and brought on a CEO, this other classmate of ours from Stanford who\u2019s also Spanish. We founded Cabify from our apartment in San Francisco. Today, it\u2019s the second-largest ride-sharing service in Spain, and in the top five in Latin America.<\/p>\n After that, I interviewed with a bunch of venture funds, and I noticed that no one came from the real estate industry. I was like, well, real estate\u2019s massive. It\u2019s 13 percent of U.S. GDP. It\u2019s the largest asset class and the largest lending category. Why has no one built a fund to focus on how to change this industry with technology?\u00a0<\/p>\n That was the original thesis for Fifth Wall. I actually brought that to Blackstone. They were going to be the anchor investor in Fifth Wall. I did a bunch of work with them on the thesis, then they decided it was too small for them, and said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you do it?\u201d So I did. That\u2019s how Fifth Wall was born.<\/p>\n Talk about the journey of getting Fifth Wall off the ground, including acquiring the funding and making it operational.\u00a0<\/p>\n I got a co-founder, Brad Greiwe, who had been chief technology officer at Invitation Homes early on and had built that business with Blackstone. He was on the front lines of tech and real estate.\u00a0<\/p>\n When we started fundraising, no one would give us money. Institutions were like, \u201cWell, real estate tech\u2019s not a thing.\u201d But I was like, \u201cIt\u2019s going to be.\u201d Their attitude was, \u201cCome back to us when it is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n So, I went to large institutional owners, operators and developers of real estate \u2014 groups like CBRE, Marriott, Host Hotels, Lennar, Hines, some of the most iconic institutional names in real estate \u2014 and I said, \u201cYou should have a strategy to identify the tech that\u2019s going to change your business.\u201d<\/p>\n Someone actually told us, \u201cI was waiting for someone to walk into our office and say this.\u201d So we hit at the right time. This was around late 2016.<\/p>\n We ended up raising quite a bit of money from owners, operators and developers of real estate \u2014 nontraditional LPs. Once we did that, institutions were like, \u201cNow you must have an unfair advantage because you have the kingmakers as limited partners. You have asymmetric information.\u201d And we started to build a Fifth Wall brand. We built our first fund in 2017, which was $212 million.<\/p>\n Tell me about some of the firm\u2019s other early wins.<\/p>\n Our first big win came pretty early on, when a new type of business emerged called an iBuyer. The thesis was, why is the largest market on Earth, residential housing, entirely a peer-to-peer market, where end users sell to other end users? There\u2019s clearly a lot of inefficiency in that. It takes a long time to sell a home. There should be a solution to intermediate that, and we wondered if we could build something like that in the residential space.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, we paired homebuilders up with Opendoor. We were a $155 million fund at the time. We made a massive fund investment, $82 million, in Opendoor from September 2016 to March 2019. That deal catapulted us because we sold at the IPO. It ended up being a multiple over 4.<\/p>\n We also made other investments in fintech around that time, including in Blend Labs and Hippo. As those went public in 2021, that really validated our thesis. It was the first external public markets validation of proptech as capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s the most satisfying aspect of running a firm of this sort?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what I\u2019m most proud of. We\u2019re consistently prescient about how the real estate industry is about to change and new asset classes are about to emerge, and we tend to get there early. We were the largest investor in iBuyers of any venture fund, and helped institutionalize that as a new asset class.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Brendan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/17_Commercial-Observer_Brendan-Wallace_09182026_C3_4396-WEB.jpg\" "\\"Fifth")