Chetrit Group

Who it is

The Chetrit Group is the investment firm of brothers Joseph and Meyer Chetrit. It holds a national portfolio of offices, apartments, hotels and development sites that The Promote has put at about 14M sf. For decades it ran a merchant's playbook of buying big, financing aggressively and trading out. Its peak-era deals included the Sony Building and the Sears Tower. It is a separate business from the Chetrit Organization, run by relatives Juda and the late Jacob Chetrit, though the families have overlapped on deals and financing.

Since 2022 the firm has become a fixture of distress coverage. Crain's reported in March 2025 that the wider family had defaulted on about $1.6B of debt, with another $300M distressed. The Chetrits lost Brooklyn's Hotel Bossert to foreclosure that February. The firm's 2019 purchase of a nearly 9K-unit portfolio from Roco Real Estate set off a lawsuit by Wells Fargo, as CMBS trustee, against JPMorgan over the $481M loan. Wells alleges JPMorgan knowingly used inflated financials, and it is also suing the Chetrit ownership entity and Meyer over his guarantee. Roco's Tyler Ross was sentenced for mortgage fraud tied to the deal. In January 2026 special servicer Mount Street moved to foreclose on the Columbus Square retail it co-owns with Stellar, alleging default on $361M.

The legal pressure is no longer only civil. In September 2025 the Manhattan DA indicted Meyer and the firm over an alleged pattern of harassing rent-regulated tenants in Chelsea, and in October charged Joseph separately with felony harassment. Those cases are pending. Creditors are also pursuing Meyer over personal guarantees. The firm has bought time in places: a $700M+ loan modification on Yorkshire and Lexington Towers, a 60% sale of the Miami River District for $106M, and a deal that brought Simon Dushinsky's Sky Equity into its Two Bridges site.