Moinian details 1.9M-square-foot Hudson Yards office tower and land buys

Joe Moinian, founder and CEO of The Moinian Group, is behind a 1.9 million-square-foot Class A office building in Hudson Yards designed by FX Collaborative, according to a Commercial Observer interview published Oct. 13.

Moinian sat for the interview on Sept. 25 and described spending 19 or 20 years in the fashion business, buying real estate on the side, then leaving travel for real estate because it did not work with a family. His first purchases were Midtown South loft buildings in 1981 and 1982, which he converted or upgraded into offices.

He credits the 1994 Giuliani administration revitalization plan for downtown Manhattan below Murray Street with starting his firm's office-to-apartment conversions. The program offered developers 10 years of real estate taxes for converting obsolete offices into apartments, he said. His firm was "probably the first people converting offices to residential," and he still owns the same buildings.

Ground-up construction followed with the Biltmore Tower at 271 West 47th Street, 400 apartments, and the Marc at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue under what the interview calls the old 80-20 program. He concluded that building from scratch produces fewer surprises than converting old stock.

Moinian's land assembly strategy was to buy sites on the premise that current zoning did not matter because Manhattan would one day be fully built, favoring parcels that ran from one traffic light to the next.

Manhattan investment sales volume reached $10.173 billion in the first half of 2026, a $20.346 billion annual pace, per PRED's reporting.