Naftali Group

Who it is

Naftali Group is the development firm founded by Miki Naftali. It made its name building boutique luxury condos on the Upper East and Upper West Sides and has since expanded well beyond them. CIO David Hochfelder joined in 2016 to rebuild the investment team. He describes a deliberate shift from a cyclical, one-project-at-a-time condo business to four lines: condos, a credit and fund-management platform, a large Florida operation, and a build-to-core mixed-use division. The firm says it has built $15B of projects across 30M sf.

Its playbook is to buy in dislocation and sit out the frothy years. After a near-total pause from 2014 to 2017, the firm made six acquisitions in about 16 months after Covid hit. Among them were the Williamsburg Wharf waterfront site, which Hochfelder says was bought for roughly 50 cents on the dollar in a deal finally pushed through by a rabbinical court, plus condo sites on the UWS, on East 77th St. and in Gramercy. The credit arm shows up in odd places too: in 2023 it made a $45M bridge loan to Grubb Properties on the long-troubled FiDi tower now known as 8 Carlisle.

Today its work centers on two megaprojects. At 800 Fifth Ave, bought for about $810M with $675M of JPMorgan/Goldentree debt, the firm plans a roughly 52-unit condo tower aiming for record pricing. In August 2026 it tapped Newmark to find a $1.3B construction loan. At Williamsburg Wharf, a JV with Len Blavatnik's Access Industries, Barings provided a $374M Phase I refi in May 2026 and JPMorgan and Goldentree are backing the $525M Phase II. Hochfelder has been one of the louder voices arguing that ultra-luxury buyers are insulated from the macro cycle. He has also called the revived pied-à-terre tax bad policy.