Nicholas Bienstock

Nicholas Bienstock is Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Savanna, a New York City–based, vertically-integrated real estate investment manager. He joined the firm in 1998 (Savanna was founded in 1992 by Christopher Schlank, with whom Bienstock runs the firm as a two-person leadership team). Over his tenure he has worked on the acquisition, financing, redevelopment, restructuring, and sale of more than $5 billion of real estate, and he sits on the firm's Investment Committee while overseeing marketing and leasing across the portfolio. He is also responsible for cultivating relationships with institutional lenders, capital partners, and the firm's fund investors — a base of more than 80 institutions worldwide including pension funds, insurers, sovereigns, and family offices.

Before Savanna, Bienstock worked at Capital Trust, Inc. in New York on real estate principal-investment and advisory transactions, and earlier in Chemical Bank's Real Estate Investment Banking Group. He is a Harvard College graduate (BA, cum laude) and holds both an MBA from Columbia Business School (Class of 1996) and an MS in Real Estate Development from Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

Beyond deal-making, Bienstock has taught real estate finance case studies as an Assistant Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and serves on the advisory board of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at Columbia Business School. He is a recognized voice on the NYC office market, appearing in Commercial Observer's Power/Owners series and speaking on panels and podcasts (e.g., Juniper Square) about office distress, recovery, and selective opportunity.

Savanna's model is distinctive for being one of the earliest funds to pair a tightly focused NYC geographic strategy with a fully vertically-integrated platform — meaning the firm buys, owns, and operates its own assets, providing in-house leasing, project management, asset management, and development/redevelopment services rather than outsourcing them.

• Invests almost exclusively in New York City commercial real estate across office, residential, and retail — Bienstock: "New York City has proven itself to be perhaps the strongest and most resilient single market in the world over the past 30 years."
• Pursues value-add, opportunistic, and distressed strategies — buying underperforming ("Class B"/"zombie") buildings and repositioning/redeveloping them into higher-value creative office and mixed-use assets.
• Actively buys discounted / defaulted debt: "The greatest opportunity we have seen in the current market has been to acquire defaulted first mortgage positions at a discount from financial institutions" — a strategy the firm used post-2008 and again through the post-pandemic office downturn.
• Operates a vertically-integrated platform (leasing, development, asset/project management in-house), which lets Savanna underwrite hands-on repositioning rather than passive holds.
• Deploys institutional fund capital raised from pension funds, insurers, sovereigns, foundations, and family offices; typical deals use meaningful leverage (~65%) on top of equity.