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HFZ Capital Group’s luxury developers staked their futures on Bjarke Ingels’s High Line debut and lost everything. Over the past 18 months, the firm has been obliterated by foreclosures and investor lawsuits. ....
HIGHLIGHT $870M The price of the XI, HFZ’s most high-profile project currently in litigation In 2009, when the world’s financial system had been shaken to its core and New York’s once-sturdy real estate market was turned on its head, Ziel Feldman was floating on top of it all. In the downbeat days of the Great Recession, Feldman’s HFZ Capital Group reveled in the crisis. “When the market crashed, I started seeing opportunity,” Feldman told Crain’s in 2013. At that point Feldman and The Related Cos. recently had finished turning around One Madison Park, one of the real estate bubble’s most infamous flops. He had plans to sell about 1,000 luxury condos across Manhattan in the ensuing few years. His company was still two years away from what remains its most famous purchase: a site by the High Line at 76 11th Ave. The XI, as the luxury condominium is now called, cost the company a staggering $870 million in 2015. ....
Ziel Feldman (right), Nir Meir and the XI (Illustration by Zach Meyer) “What’s the latest?” read the text that popped up on Nir Meir’s phone one Thursday afternoon in July. “Running out of time.” The message to the HFZ Capital Group managing principal was from Adam Gibbons, an executive at CIM Group. The lender was awaiting an overdue payment on $90 million of mezzanine debt it holds on four prewar Manhattan apartment buildings HFZ is converting to condominiums. “On it,” Meir wrote back. “2 min.” Four hours later, a reference number popped up on Gibbons’ phone. It seemed the $2.3 million HFZ owed had been wired. ....