Gary Barnett has hired Andrew Chung as his partner at Extell Development as the prolific condo builder sets his sights on more commercial projects.
Chung, who was one of the trailblazers of the mid-2010s last-mile warehouse boom, is joining Extell with the titles of president and co-CEO, Barnett announced Tuesday.
“Andrew is a highly respected leader with a rare combination of development expertise and institutional investment experience,” Barnett said in a statement. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with Andrew over the years and have long admired what he built at Innovo, as well as his track record at Carlyle. I’m confident his strategic perspective will be invaluable as we continue to grow and enter Extell’s next chapter.”
As Chung joins Extell, his company Innovo Property Group will continue to operate with its existing team, according to a person familiar with his plans.
It’s not clear exactly how and when the two first met, but Extell had partnered with the Carlyle Group to develop Riverside Drive in the late 2000s when Chung was working for the private equity giant.
Barnett said Chung will work closely with him to oversee Extell’s strategic direction, development pipeline, capital relationships and long-term growth plans across its residential, commercial and mixed-use investments.
It’s another attempt by Barnett to find a right-hand at Extell as the company makes some contrarian moves.
The last time Extell had a CEO that wasn’t Barnett was when the company hired Westbrook Partners’ Sush Torgalkar in 2019. Torgalkar lasted a bit more than a year and a half before leaving in 2020 to start his own firm, Sage Hall Partners.
Prior to that, Extell had seen a number of high-level departures. One of Barnett’s longtime deputies, Raizy Haas, left in 2019 after more than two decades at the company. Extell’s marketing lead, Anna Zarro, left in 2018 to form her own firm. Another top executive, assemblage expert Dov Hertz, left in 2016 to form investment firm DH Property Holdings.
Barnett, best known for developing market-defining condo towers like One57 and Central Park Tower on Billionaires’ Row, has recently been focusing on commercial projects.
He’s developing a 29-story office tower at 570 Fifth Avenue, anchored by an 80,000-square-foot Ikea store and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, which agreed to lease roughly 700,000 square feet.
He’s also made a play to take over the 1.8 million-square-foot Worldwide Plaza office tower from SL Green and RXR through a UCC foreclosure.
Barnett, who normally shies away from media appearances, last year gave some interviews where he talked about the favorable conditions in the office market.
“Here we are back with almost every company now, including ours, saying you have to be in the office three-to-four days a week, five days a week,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Having the social network of people working together and being together, there’s nothing like it. That’s why we’re able to build brand-new office buildings.”
Chung, meanwhile, brings along a track record of pioneering projects.
He worked at Carlyle when the company teamed up with the Chera family’s Crown Acquisitions to buy a majority interest in the retail at 666 Fifth Avenue from Kushner Companies for $525 million in 2008. That same year the firm joined with Ben Ashkenazy to buy 650 Madison Avenue, a 27-story Plaza District office building, for $680 million.
Chung left Carlyle to launch Innovo in 2015 and was one of the first developers to go really big into the last-mile warehouse space. He developed the 1 million-square-foot, multi-story industrial building at 2505 Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx. Amazon leases about half of the building.
It wasn’t all wins for the up-and-coming developer, though.
In 2022 a deal he put together to buy the HSBC office tower near Bryant Park for $855 million fell apart. Chung ended up losing his $30 million deposit.
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