At a glance
Firm: Fortis Property Group Founders & principals: Louis Kestenbaum (Chairman) and Joel Kestenbaum (President); Jonathan Landau served as CEO and development lead until December 2022 Founded: Circa 2005 (Brooklyn, New York) Headquarters: Brooklyn, NY Focus: Diversified real estate — began with large-scale Class A office acquisition nationally, then pivoted to ground-up New York condominium development, concentrated on the Brooklyn waterfront and Manhattan luxury condominiums Frequent design partners: Hill West Architects; S9 Architecture (a Perkins Eastman affiliate) Portfolio scale: Reported at more than 8 million square feet of assets across the firm's history (self-reported; approximate) Signature reputation: An ambitious ground-up developer whose Manhattan condominium record is defined by one completed success (540West) and one of the most public construction failures of the modern cycle — the stalled, leaning tower at 161 Maiden Lane Source: The Roebling Team at Compass — verified against public records, court filings, and published reporting. July 2026.
Who Fortis Property Group is
Fortis is the development firm of the Kestenbaum family — Louis Kestenbaum, who serves as Chairman, and his son Joel Kestenbaum, who serves as President — founded in the mid-2000s and based in Brooklyn. For much of its public-facing development era the firm was led on a day-to-day basis by Jonathan Landau, a Cleveland-raised attorney who practiced corporate and real-estate law before joining Fortis and rose to CEO; Landau is credited internally with the firm's headline New York condominium and hospital-conversion projects. He left in December 2022 to launch his own company, and the Kestenbaums remain the firm's principals.
The firm's arc is unusual. In its first years Fortis was an opportunistic commercial acquirer, buying Class A office towers across several markets — reportedly assembling billions of dollars in assets within a couple of years of founding, including a well-publicized purchase of an office tower from Hines. In the 2010s it turned toward ground-up residential development, and it is that residential chapter — the Brooklyn waterfront platform and a pair of Manhattan condominiums — that a buyer is most likely to encounter today.
For a buyer, the relevant point is that Fortis is an ambitious ground-up developer whose completed New York for-sale record is short and sharply divided. One Manhattan condominium (540West) delivered cleanly; the other (161 Maiden Lane) became the most-watched construction cautionary tale in Lower Manhattan. Both belong in any honest read of the sponsor.
What they build
Across its residential work Fortis builds ground-up, market-rate condominiums — full-service buildings pitched at the upper end of their submarkets, from a courtyard-organized low-rise in Hell's Kitchen to a glass waterfront tower downtown to a multi-building master plan in Brooklyn. The firm frequently acts as its own developer-builder and has worked repeatedly with Hill West Architects and with S9 Architecture (a Perkins Eastman affiliate).
Fortis is also known for a specialty most luxury developers avoid: complex, politically contested site acquisitions. Its Brooklyn flagship rose on the former Long Island College Hospital campus in Cobble Hill — a multi-year, litigation-heavy purchase from the State University of New York — which the firm chose to build largely as-of-right. That appetite for difficult, contested sites is a defining trait, and it cuts both ways: it produces distinctive parcels, and it produces friction.
Buildings by Fortis Property Group
Fortis projects already profiled on this site:
- 161 Maiden Lane (Seaport Residences) — the Hill West-designed ~670-foot Financial District condominium that topped out, was found leaning about three inches, and has stood unfinished since 2020 (see Reputation, below)
- 545 West 48th Street (540West) — the 2015 S9 Architecture-designed Hell's Kitchen condominium, a two-tower building organized around a 6,000-square-foot landscaped courtyard
Other notable Fortis work includes the multi-building River Park development on the former Long Island College Hospital site in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn — a master plan combining the restored 1897 Polhemus Building, townhouses, and several residential towers alongside an NYU Langone ambulatory-care center — and 20 Bayard Street (Bayard Views) in Williamsburg, a building Fortis took over as sponsor out of a prior developer's bankruptcy.
Track record and market performance
Fortis's completed New York for-sale record is short, and it reads as two opposite outcomes.
540West (545 West 48th Street) is the success: completed in 2015, roughly 110 residences across two towers, it delivered on schedule, sold through, and has traded normally in the resale market ever since. It is the reference point for what a Fortis condominium looks like when the process works.
161 Maiden Lane is the failure, and it is one of the most public in the city. The building had every marketing advantage — a rare true-waterfront parcel, open East River and harbor views, an accepted offering plan, and a topped-out structure — and it sold well: roughly 71 of about 80 units went under contract. What it did not deliver was a finished building. After the structure was found to be leaning and construction stalled, essentially all of those contracted buyers walked. For a buyer studying this sponsor, that split is the whole lesson: a strong sales result means nothing if the building is never completed, and the risk that matters most in new development is the one that never appears in the rendering.
Reputation and what a buyer should know
Fortis's reputation is dominated by 161 Maiden Lane, and it is essential to separate what is a genuine building-quality and construction failure from what is a financing dispute — because both are present, and they are not the same thing.
The construction and structural story is real, and it is the relevant one. Public reporting and court filings describe a building founded on a soil-improvement approach rather than the deep pilings used by neighboring towers, on a downtown landfill site with bedrock far below. The tower topped out in 2018 and was found leaning roughly three inches to the north, with the developer later notifying buyers of a larger figure. Contractors reportedly poured upper-floor slabs unevenly to counteract the tilt, which the construction manager's counsel characterized as leaving the building bent rather than merely leaning. The construction manager, Pizzarotti, was dismissed and sued Fortis, alleging the lean rendered the tower unsafe; Fortis countersued, blaming Pizzarotti for surveying and safety failures. Independent engineers (WSP and Arup are named in the record) ultimately concluded the lean did not compromise the building's structural integrity — a building that leans is not necessarily unstable — and a successor contractor, Ray Builders, designed a curtain wall to accommodate it and briefly resumed work. That momentum did not hold: exterior work halted around September 2020, sections of the glass curtain wall were removed, and the tower has stood as a partially clad shell for more than five years, tangled in more than two dozen lawsuits. The construction record also includes serious safety incidents during the build — including a worker fatality (a subcontractor pleaded guilty to manslaughter) and multiple DOB violations — matters of public record stated here plainly.
The financing story is separate. Layered on top of the construction failure is a distinct thicket of lender, mezzanine, and foreclosure litigation — construction-loan foreclosure, a large mezzanine-lender fraud claim, failed mediations, contested attempts to sell the debt, and appellate rulings that continued into late 2025. Those are disputes about money and capital structure, not about how the building was built. They matter because they are why the project has no clear path to completion — but they should not be confused with the structural problem, which is the building-quality issue. As of this writing, the tower remains stalled, unfinished, and contested, with no confirmed final foreclosure outcome, restart, or new owner.
Fortis's other buildings tell a much cleaner story. No construction-defect litigation or notable quality problem has surfaced at 540West, which has performed normally. At 20 Bayard Street in Williamsburg, the condominium board did allege defects — but a court found those defects predated Fortis, which had only acquired unsold units out of the prior developer's bankruptcy, and ruled Fortis not liable for that prior work. The firm's contract and payment disputes (including on the River Park hospital conversion) and the intense community and political opposition to the LICH acquisition are, respectively, commercial matters and NIMBY-and-politics matters — not building-defect findings — and are not treated as quality issues here.
For a buyer, the practical guidance is specific: at any Fortis-sponsored building, and at any stalled or recently-troubled new-development project generally, construction status and structural history are not footnotes — they are the deal. Read the offering plan, confirm the building's completion and certificate-of-occupancy status, review lien and title, understand the deposit terms and what protects them if the building is not finished, and study the sponsor's balance sheet and litigation exposure before you sign.
The Roebling Team on Fortis buildings
We publish developer profiles because a buyer choosing a new-construction or recently-converted condominium is, in part, betting on the developer — its quality, its staying power, and its record when things go wrong. The Roebling Team at Compass tracks the sponsors behind Manhattan's luxury inventory building by building, and we bring that context to every new-development transaction: what the developer has built, how those buildings have held value, and what to verify before you sign.
If you're evaluating a Fortis building — or weighing it against another sponsor's product — a 30-minute consultation is the right starting point.
Corey Cohen, Principal · The Roebling Team at Compass 646.939.7375 · c.cohen@compass.com
This developer profile reflects publicly available information — including NYC public records, court filings, and published reporting — and The Roebling Team's transaction experience. It is provided for research purposes and is not legal advice; nothing here alleges wrongdoing or building defects beyond what the cited public record supports. The Roebling Team at Compass does not represent Fortis Property Group. © 2026 The Roebling Team at Compass.