At a glance
Firm: Rose Associates Founders: Brothers David Rose and Samuel B. Rose Founded: Late 1920s (the firm today marks its founding as 1925) Current leadership: Amy Rose (CEO) and Adam R. Rose (Vice Chairman) — third-generation family principals; Marc Ehrlich named President in 2024 (the first non-family member in a top role) Headquarters: 777 Third Avenue, New York, NY Focus: Vertically integrated owner-builder, investor, and residential property manager — ground-up rental and mixed development, office-to-residential conversion, and one of the metro area's largest multifamily management platforms Portfolio scale: Tens of thousands of apartments under management across the New York metro area Signature reputation: A conservative, long-horizon family firm historically known for building and managing rental housing with its own capital and low leverage Source: The Roebling Team at Compass — verified against public records, court filings, and published reporting. July 2026.
Who Rose Associates is
Rose Associates is a multi-generational New York real estate family firm, founded in the late 1920s by brothers David Rose and Samuel B. Rose, who began with small apartment buildings and grew, over three generations, into one of the metro area's most established owner-builders and residential managers. The firm today marks its founding as 1925 and speaks of a hundred-year history in the city.
The lineage runs deep. The second generation — Frederick P. Rose, Daniel Rose, and Elihu Rose, sons of co-founder Samuel B. Rose — led the firm through its post-war expansion; Frederick, the longtime chairman, is also the family's best-known philanthropist, the namesake of Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. The current, third generation — Amy Rose, who in 2017 became the firm's first CEO and first woman to lead it, and Adam R. Rose, now Vice Chairman — owns and runs the business today.
One clarification matters up front, because the family name attaches to more than one real estate company. Rose Associates is not Jonathan Rose Companies. The latter is a separate green- and affordable-housing developer founded in 1989 by Jonathan F.P. Rose after he left Rose Associates; the two firms are run by different branches of the family, and the projects of one should not be attributed to the other. This profile concerns Rose Associates — the owner-builder and property manager.
What they build
Historically, Rose Associates has been an owner-builder of rental and residential housing — a firm that developed buildings to own and operate rather than to sell off, and that was known for buying with its own capital and minimizing debt. That conservative posture is the firm's defining trait and the reason it has endured across cycles that ended less patient developers.
The platform today is fully integrated: acquisitions, ground-up development, office-to-residential conversion, asset management, leasing, and — larger than any single development line — property management. Rose is one of the largest managers of multifamily housing in the New York metro area, with tens of thousands of units under management. Its ground-up development is selective and typically pursued through joint ventures with partners, while the management and operations side runs at far greater scale. For a resident or a buyer in a Rose-managed or Rose-built rental, that operating depth is a real part of the value: this is a firm that runs buildings for the long term, not one that hands the keys off at sellout.
Buildings by Rose Associates
Rose Associates projects already profiled on this site:
- 252 East 57th Street — the 65-story SOM (Roger Duffy) tower at Sutton Place, co-developed by World Wide Group and Rose Associates in a public-private partnership with the city's Educational Construction Fund, built above two new public schools (a mixed rental-and-condominium building, completed around 2016)
- 7 Lexington Avenue — a Gramercy building developed by Rose Associates as a rental in 1948 and converted to cooperative ownership around 1990–1991, with the sponsor retaining the ground-floor commercial space
Other notable Rose Associates work includes the 70 Pine Street office-to-residential conversion in the Financial District — the former AIG/Cities Service tower, which Rose co-developed as an equity partner in a joint venture with DTH Capital — along with a pipeline of rental developments across Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, and the northern suburbs pursued with partners such as Benenson Capital and Friedland Properties.
Track record and market performance
Rose's record is best read through the lens of what the firm is: a long-horizon owner-operator, not a merchant condominium sponsor. Its signature recent projects — the SOM tower at 252 East 57th and the landmarked 70 Pine conversion — are complex, civic-scale buildings delivered in partnership with institutional co-developers, and both stand as durable, well-run additions to their neighborhoods. The 70 Pine conversion ran over its original budget and schedule, as landmarked conversions of that size routinely do, but delivered a stabilized, fully occupied building; that is a story about the difficulty of the asset, not about the quality of the work.
In 2017 Rose sharpened its focus, selling its condominium- and co-op-management arm to Terra Holdings to concentrate on its core multifamily rental business, and it has continued to develop and finance new rental units since. For a buyer or renter, the signal is consistency: a firm that has stayed in its lane — building and running rental housing — across a century of New York cycles.
Reputation and what a buyer should know
On build quality, Rose Associates has a clean record. We found no lawsuit — by any condominium board, cooperative, or group of unit owners — alleging construction defects, facade failure, water infiltration, or structural problems at a Rose Associates-developed building, and no offering-plan enforcement or safety action tied to a Rose development. Given how selectively the firm develops for sale relative to the enormous scale of its rental and management business, that clean sheet is both genuine and unsurprising.
The disputes that do appear are the ordinary kind for a firm that manages tens of thousands of apartments: routine premises-liability and tenant matters in which Rose is named as building manager, not as developer — none of which bear on construction quality. Buildings that surface under a casual "Rose" search but belong to entirely different developers, and unrelated companies that share the Rose name, are excluded here.
For a buyer, standard diligence applies with no red flag specific to this sponsor: read the offering plan (and, at a conversion like 7 Lexington, understand the retained-commercial structure), confirm lien and title status, and review the warranty and any punch list. On a Rose-built rental, the relevant question is less about defect risk than about the terms and management standard of a long-term owner-operator.
The Roebling Team on Rose Associates 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 Rose Associates 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 Rose Associates. © 2026 The Roebling Team at Compass.