Jeffrey Gural didn’t set out to be a real estate mogul. The chairman of GFP Real Estate — which owns and manages almost 19 million square feet in New York City — packed up after college and headed west to work for the California highway department.
“I had no interest in the family business,” Gural told the crowd at The Real Deal’s Salon Series event Thursday night. “I wasn’t one of those people where their father drove them around and showed them buildings on the weekends. My father was playing golf on the weekends.” His father, Aaron Gural, was chairman of Newmark & Company from 1957 to 1998.
But fate — and his father and his partners — had other plans. After he moved back to New York and spent a stint working for Morse-Diesel Construction Company, Gural joined the family brokerage business. That would become the foundation for a commercial real estate empire.
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Gural, whose passion was construction, started buying old warehouses and turning them into co-ops. “It didn’t make money, but it was fun,” he said. Then he partnered with Barry Gosin, who brought ambition, flash and a hunger for deals.
“I had no desire to be particularly wealthy. I thought middle class was good,” Gural said. “Barry was driven.”
In the 1980s, they started scooping up B- and C-class buildings across Manhattan in “back-of-the-envelope deals” in forgotten manufacturing blocks that are now the neighborhoods everyone wants to be in. Gural would find the buildings and Gosin would handle the leasing.
“If I thought a building could make 10 percent in two to four years, I bought it,” he said.
Over the next four decades and several downturns, Gural grew the landlord and management firm, eventually changing the name to GFP Real Estate to eliminate confusion between the company and its affiliate, Newmark Knight Frank.
Gural stuck to his thesis of holding onto properties and resisting the urge to sell.
“I hated selling,” he said. “I look around and who are the richest real estate people in New York? The people who never sell.”
Today, GFP is converting his most famous asset — the Flatiron Building — into luxury condos that so far start at just below $11 million for a 3,000-square-foot unit, according to an offering plan filed with the Attorney General’s office. A buyer recently signed the first contract at the conversion and the building has two other offers, Gural said.
Gural is also managing partner of the Meadowlands Racetrack and owns a racino and a casino in upstate New York, where he responds to every comment card and is known for his orange Crocs.
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