Alex Witkoff isn’t like the other real estate heirs.
He’s young but not as bright-eyed as Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, the 20-something sons of Howard Lutnick, who earlier this year took over as Commerce Secretary and appointed the two as the heads of the parent company that controls Cantor Fitzgerald and Newmark Group.
Alex is early in his career but no novice. Now that his father, Steve Witkoff, is Special Envoy to the Middle East, the son’s decade-long schooling at the family’s development company, the Witkoff Group, is apparently over. Steve, out to firewall his peacemaking duties, put Alex, his co-CEO of two years, in the driver’s seat. They say Alex can’t call for advice in a pinch or even talk business at dinner.
That makes him unlike the Kushner and Trump inheritors, who during President Donald Trump’s first administration faced criticism over dealings that tangled business and governance. (A cryptocurrency venture run by Alex’s brother Zach and championed by the administration brushes closer to conflict-of-interest territory.)
And, in a business where generations make, lose, rebuild and lose again their family’s fortunes, Alex also hasn’t shown signs of wayward son impulses, like Stefan Soloviev with his grain train in Kansas or his brother Zach. “I’ve moved on to different pastures,” Zach told The Real Deal.
Alex, rather, is a real businessman, a father’s dream — smart, prepped and trained for a job leading expensive top-of-the-line projects in the nation’s most competitive markets — and thus far he’s managed to sidestep the spotlight, keep disasters out of the press and avoid embarrassment.
“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with it,” Alex said mildly from a chair overlooking the courtyard of the Witkoffs’ One High Line. He wore all navy blue: pants, a short-sleeve collared shirt with white trim and sneakers, taking refuge in the building’s air conditioning on a recent hot afternoon. “Thankfully, I’m at a good age and in my 30s, where I have tremendous energy, and we have a great team of people.”
Those who’ve worked with Steve for decades say they’re confident Alex has the chops to carry the business forward while his dad’s off saving the world. By the end of last year, Witkoff Group’s One High Line surpassed $1 billion in sales, while at South Florida’s the Shore Club, the penthouse reportedly scored a contract for $120 million, which would be a record deal for a condo in Miami-Dade County. The company took both projects over after foreclosures on HFZ Capital, the original developer.
Yet in an industry that worships an archetype of developer as skyline-shaping cowboy armed with nothing but chutzpah and a vision, he’s an heir apparent who runs spreadsheets where his dad once strapped a handgun to his ankle, who opts for reputational management over devil-may-care audacity and defaults to reticence instead of charm.
Perhaps his way is emblematic of a new generation rising in the ranks, one born to privilege, educated in the Ivy League and steeped in the idea of protecting a legacy created by someone more bombastic.
“He worked hard, started from nothing and built something great,” Alex said of his dad. “I don’t think that’s anything to apologize for. I think that’s something to be proud of.”
But maybe the smarts, attention to detail and number crunching carry their own risk: The pilot who can land a plane perfectly can’t always imagine its next adventure. Alex thinks of development largely in terms of dollars and cents, he said in interviews, and though sources say his passion comes through in the creation of top-tier projects, especially their aesthetic details, he doesn’t appear to be in it for the glory.
Out of the ring
When Alex was about 9, he didn’t want to join the family business, his younger brother Zach remembered. “I think he wanted to be a lawyer, actually.”
To be fair, the scions felt mostly free to choose their own paths, Zach said, as long as they showed up at the top of their game.
But they also knew that their father wanted to pass the torch. He never sought to be “some sort of old boxer,” he told TRD in 2017.
“Any smart company is always thinking about succession,” Alex said. “But I don’t think we planned for it to happen exactly on November 5, 2024” — the day Donald Trump won his re-election and Steve’s path toward the administration came into focus.
The surprise element was a non-factor, if you ask the Witkoffs. “It wasn’t a hard call for me because I knew the business was in good hands,” Steve said at TRD’s New York Forum in May.
Steve always said learning the job should start from the bottom, Zach recalled. His first role at Witkoff, when he was in high school, was at a nonunion construction team, working on one of the firm’s rental properties on West 95th Street and Columbus Avenue.
“Steve can just charm you and bring you into this Steve magic. Alex is not so interested in that. They get the same thing accomplished, but they do it in different ways.”
But Alex, who officially joined in 2015 after a stint at Morgan Stanley, started out as executive vice president with hands in the firm’s acquisitions and development departments. At the time, Witkoff was working on the Edition in West Hollywood, and Alex got his apprenticeship in groundup development there.
For both Witkoff brothers, the stakes were clear from the outset: Play your cards right, and the world’s your oyster. Don’t, and risk losing everything. Steve called it “protecting your downside.”
In the last year or two, Zach left the company to run the family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, with Eric Trump and Don Jr., which had raised $550 million through the sale of its “governance tokens” by March of this year. It doesn’t appear to have affected his relationship with his brother. Zach lives just a seven-minute drive from Alex in a house on Miami Beach, with his wife and their newborn son, named Don James after the president. Alex visits frequently.
“I don’t feel like me and Alex compete at all,” Zach said. “To be honest with you, he was always much better at structuring real estate deals than I was.”
The crown
Three years after Alex joined Witkoff Group, the company doubled down on South Florida following a pullback from the state in the wake of the financial crisis.
In 2021, developer Ari Pearl brought Steve, a known golf enthusiast, in on Shell Bay, a mixed-use condo, hotel and golf course project in Hallandale Beach. Alex has worked with Pearl on the development since then, as his father promoted him to co-CEO shortly after its inception. He tackled the day-to-day operations of the company, while Steve focused on the big-picture relationships.
Witkoff also took over what became the Shore Club on Miami Beach after Witkoff’s partner, Monroe Capital, foreclosed on the property, the development of which was canceled by Ziel Feldman and his now-defunct firm, HFZ Capital, in 2018.
Since Witkoff’s turn back to South Florida, “I’ve dealt much more with Alex than Steve,” Niesen Kasdin, a former mayor of Miami Beach and now attorney and lobbyist, said. He’s known Steve since before the Great Recession.
But Kasdin’s first impression of Alex wasn’t great. He thought the developer seemed young and arrogant, a new guy attempting to appear bigger than his britches.
“He was very sure of himself and assertive about his ambitions,” Kasdin said.
His notions changed once the two started on the details.
“After you work with him, you realize he is really that smart, and he really has a clear thought about what he’s doing and how things should be handled,” Kasdin said.
At the Shore Club, Alex ran the approval process for the building. It was arduous, according to Monroe Capital’s Kyle Asher. Alex got the project through relatively unscathed, Asher said, even as it faced opposition from the neighboring Setai Resort and Residences.
Asher credits Alex with bringing Auberge on as the hotel brand to anchor the Shore Club. Asher added that on One High Line in New York City, where they are also partners, Alex led sales and construction.
All the preparation meant that when November ’24 arrived, Alex was already leading most of the firm’s ongoing projects and had become the new point person for many of Steve’s longtime contacts.
“What I do on a daily basis really didn’t materially change all that much,” Craig Murphy, the executive vice president of the firm’s construction department, said. Murphy has worked with Steve since his days running Stellar Management with the late Larry Gluck; the two built a rental portfolio in the Bronx and Harlem before Steve went out on his own.
Brick wall
Put Alex in front of a crowd, and the accolades seem to exit stage left. In May, he sat by his father at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea at TRD’s annual forum, on a panel about succession at the firm.
As the interview went on, TRD’s publisher Amir Korangy noted that father and son were sticking to a script, and Steve was doing most of the talking.
“Alex, you can’t give me a canned response,” Korangy said, addressing the heir. “I want your real, honest response.”
Alex keeps a tight grip on his image. He and Zach were raised to care about presentation: Important meetings warranted shaved faces and clean suits. Promising something meant following through. He’d tell the kids: “Be a man people can count on.”
Press coverage of Alex has stayed limited to one-off news about deals, project achievements and charitable contributions. A Google alert with his name turns up almost no results. Scheduling time with Alex and even connecting with others who know him was an exercise in getting the runaround. He canceled a photoshoot hours before start time because he hadn’t brought a suit and didn’t want to be pictured without one. When the sit-down with TRD finally occurred, he tiptoed around such questions as the last time he, his brother and his dad were in the same room together; his most recent padel partners; and his personal strengths as a developer.
“My job now is to be well rounded. It’s not to be one dimensional,” he finally said of his strengths.
His control extends to his dealings with agents.
“Of all the developers I’ve ever worked with, and I don’t say that lightly, he is the most present, in the sense that he’s almost weirdly obsessed with what we do as real estate agents,” Fredrik Eklund, co-founder of the top-producing Eklund-Gomes team at Douglas Elliman, said.
Eklund worked with Alex at Shell Bay and the Shore Club; Eklund purchased a unit at Shore Club. He described Alex as being “intimately involved” with not just every agent on the sales team, but even those who bring prospective buyers into the building.
“He’s telling me, ‘Why hasn’t so-and-so at Corcoran been at the sales office in the last month?’” Eklund said. “Then he calls that person and says, ‘Why haven’t you done a deal? I thought you were so great. You haven’t done a deal at one of my buildings lately.”
Eklund characterized Alex as demanding. He’s decisive, moved by results, not emotions. It’s not personal, but “if you’re not producing, you’re out,” Eklund said. He doesn’t befriend people he works with, he told Eklund.
But he’s on the frontlines of reshaping Miami Beach. The firm’s track record of iconic developments like 150 Charles in New York, where a financier just flipped his unit for $60 million — nearly double its purchase price — attracts the motivated.
One place Alex will admit he shines (others agree) is working with the City of Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board.
The board, whose decisions can make or break a project, holds rigorous standards, and plans often go through numerous rounds before they’re greenlit. Alex spent a lot of time there in ’21 and ’22, when the Shore Club needed approval.
“Pretty much every single discussion, every single community meeting, every single board hearing, every single thing, I personally became very involved in,” he said. “Because we call it a binary outcome. If you get approved, great. If you don’t, not good.”
But he wasn’t done with the board after Shore Club’s happy outcome. Moving to Miami Beach in 2020 earned him points with the preservation commission, which now trusts that he’s embedded in the community, and the city even appointed him to the Ad Hoc Preservation Advisory Committee, a cohort of private sector members tasked with updating Miami Beach’s preservation rules.
Alex in his image
Alex’s ironclad walls might seem unusual for executives of his generation, who’ve grown up alongside social media, their personal and professional lives displayed for mass consumption. Unless it’s the opposite: a Gen Z attempt to edit and curate real life as if it were Instagram. Or, perhaps, in Alex’s case, wanting control of his identity has a more timeless root — a son’s reaction to having to fill his father’s mammoth shoes in a risky industry where a couple bad moments can destroy it all.
Everyone, including Alex, gets that Alex isn’t Steve. He lacks Steve’s signature magnetism, and his thinking is more methodical, step by step rather than top down. He’s less interested in blurring the line between friends, clients and employees.
But being a carbon copy of his father isn’t his aspiration, according to Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman, whose new development marketing firm is heading sales at One High Line. It’s a dynamic Liebman is familiar with as the woman who stepped up after the legendary Barbara Corcoran.
Steve is “one of the greatest schmoozers of all time,” Liebman said. “Steve can just charm you and bring you into this Steve magic. Alex is not so interested in that. They get the same thing accomplished, but they do it in different ways.”
Alex is going to continue to build, he said, “in the areas I think we’re known for, whether it’s purchasing distressed debt, taking over complex scenarios, new condominium projects and hospitality projects.” He will also remain on the hunt for golf-related projects.
But his list of new frontiers is short and conservative: introducing new technology and looking for opportunities with data centers. He said the firm isn’t limited to projects in New York and Miami, but of those two, he foresees a stronger push in South Florida.
Even though he’s on top of his game, the Witkoff Group a titan in the industry, Alex’s vision for the future seems almost small compared to the earthshattering nature of Zach’s crypto venture or Steve’s world peace.
But, it’s his.
Asked whether Steve plans to come back after Trump’s term, Alex made a typically cagey suggestion: We should find out from Steve. “He’s divested from the company,” he said. “I think right now, he’s just focused on his current position.”
