Steve Stuart is leaving Fortress Investment Group, The Real Deal has learned.
Stuart is a managing director of Fortress and leads the firm’s new business origination for the credit and real estate team.
Stuart joined Fortress in 2002 and was often the public face of the investment giant during some of the largest and juiciest New York City real estate deals.
“I immensely enjoyed my time there,” said Stuart when reached for comment. “I think that platform is in a good spot and I will miss working with the folks there.”
Stuart did not disclose whether he had a new venture lined up.
Stuart’s departure follows other notable exits from Fortress in recent months, including Randall Shy, Andrew Bartholomew, Alexandra Wiggins and Ivan Yee.
Stuart’s exit comes a year after Mubadala Capital and Fortress completed a buyout of SoftBank Group’s interest in Fortress Investment Group. At the closing of that deal, Joshua Pack and Drew McKnight, formerly managing partners at Fortress, became the co-CEOs. Fortress’ long-time CEO Pete Briger moved to a chairman role.
Briger and Stuart joined Fortress at the same time in 2002.
Stuart is based in New York City and Pack and McKnight’s office is in Dallas, which shifted the center of power at Fortress to Texas, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Stuart was behind several momentous transactions at Fortress, but his deal with Harry Macklowe in 2007 remains legendary. Macklowe sought to acquire 7 million square feet of office space from Blackstone Group with just $50 million of his own money. He had a $1.2 billion hole to fill in his financing and needed to raise the money in two weeks.
“It was an absurd amount of money to come up with so quickly. Even in the high-flying world of big-city real estate, this was shylock territory,” author Adam Piore wrote in his book, The New Kings of New York. “But both [Fortress’ Steve] Stuart and Macklowe knew that Fortress was one of the very few players who might consider it.”
Fortress offered to provide the money at an interest rate above 15 percent with personal guarantees from Macklowe. After Lehman Brothers collapsed, Macklowe defaulted on his loans and lost most of his office holdings.
Stuart is leaving on good terms, and the decision was mutual, per sources.
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