$100M Pre-Crash Sale
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Michael Sonnenfeldt shares how selling his first major real estate project at age 30 led to a fortunate timing before the 1987 market crash.
"I sold my first project when I was 30. The project was sold for over $100 million in 1987. It was heralded as the most successful real estate project in metropolitan history in terms of financial return.
99% of what we were worth was tied up in that project. If somebody had got hurt or killed in construction, it could've wiped us out. So we sold and closed in January of '87, and in October '87 the market crashed and real estate followed after that.
We had been one of the top 100 developers and we might have been one of 5 developers in the whole country that had lots of capital and no buildings to weigh us down with problems from the market crash. That gave us an extraordinary opportunity to get back in at the bottom, and I did that by creating a company that bought distressed real estate from banks and went on to buy close to a billion dollars of assets."
Michael Sonnenfeldt
Michael W. Sonnenfeldt is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and political activist. Currently, he is the founder and chairman of TIGER, chairman of MUUS & Company and MUUS Climate Partners, Co-Chairman, Climate Pathways Project at the Sloan School, MIT, Board member Center for New American Security (CNAS), President, Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Foundation and author of “Think Bigger and 39 Other Lessons from Successful Entrepreneurs" published by Bloomberg/Wiley in 2017.entrepreneurship and wealth management.