Bruce Schanzer filed a 13D on Empire State Realty Trust Tuesday, disclosing that Erez Asset Management now holds 5.8% of the company that owns the Empire State Building and thirteen other Manhattan office properties. The stake, purchased across recent months, represents roughly $67 million at current prices. Schanzer sold his own REIT, Cedar Realty Trust, to Wheeler Real Estate in 2021 for $450 million and has been quiet since. This is his re-entry.
Empire State trades at approximately $9.40 per share, a 40% discount to the company's stated net asset value of roughly $16 per share. The portfolio includes 10.1 million square feet across Manhattan and Westchester, with the flagship Empire State Building representing 2.8 million square feet and driving approximately 30% of net operating income. Occupancy across the office portfolio sits at 89%, above the Manhattan average of 85%, but leasing spreads have compressed 18% year-over-year as tenant improvement allowances climb. The REIT also holds a 625,000 square-foot retail segment, mostly street-level Manhattan storefronts, that has underperformed since the pandemic.
Schanzer's history matters here. At Cedar, he executed sale-leasebacks, spun off non-core assets, and ultimately forced a sale after years of trading below replacement cost. Erez's 13D language is polite but pointed: the filing references "strategic alternatives" and "capital allocation priorities," the standard prelude to demanding asset sales, buybacks, or a going-private transaction. The Empire State Building itself is not easily sold—landmark status, complex ownership layers, and the public-market stigma of Manhattan office make a clean exit unlikely—but the thirteen surrounding properties are another matter. Schanzer knows how to strip a portfolio down to what sells and what doesn't.
The timing follows a pattern visible across distressed office REITs. SL Green, Vornado, and Paramount Group have all traded below 0.7× NAV in the past eighteen months, and activists have circled each. Empire State is smaller, simpler, and more symbolic, which makes it both easier to pressure and harder to ignore. The company's board has four members with real estate operating backgrounds but no recent capital markets experience. Schanzer will likely push for board seats, a formal strategic review, and—if the discount persists—a take-private bid funded by family offices or foreign capital that see Manhattan office as a long-duration volatility trade rather than a going concern.
Watch for a formal response from Empire State's board within 30 days, the standard window for acknowledging a 13D with strategic language. If Schanzer files an additional schedule within 60 days increasing his stake beyond 7%, expect a proxy fight by late Q2. Also watch whether any of the twelve institutional holders above 3%—including Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street—reduce positions, which would signal that passive capital is exiting before the activists arrive. The next quarterly earnings call, scheduled for late April, will be the first public forum where management must address Schanzer's position.
Manhattan office distress is not new, but this is the first activist with a successful REIT-liquidation track record to stake a material claim on a trophy asset during this cycle. The Empire State Building is not for sale, but everything around it might be.
The takeaway
Schanzer's 5.8% position sets up a forced strategic review at a REIT trading 40% below NAV with no clear path to closing the gap organically.
Editorial & Disclosure Notice: This article was written with artificial intelligence from public sources and is published without individual human review. Artificial intelligence and other digital tools are also used for research, analysis, editing, formatting, and production. Errors, omissions, outdated information, or inaccuracies may occur. References to companies, brands, products, services, organizations, or individuals are for informational and editorial purposes and do not imply endorsement, sponsorship, affiliation, partnership, or approval unless expressly stated. All trademarks and other intellectual property remain the property of their respective owners. Opinions, analysis, estimates, and commentary are informational only and should not be construed as financial, investment, legal, tax, medical, procurement, or other professional advice. Information may be corrected, clarified, or updated after publication. Corrections or removal requests: jenny@pops4.com.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.