Layoffs gut two firms with real estate ties

The ongoing struggles of the commercial real estate industry may be starting to doom companies with close ties to the sector.

Hudson Square-based Lev, a tech firm that offers a commercial-lending platform, recently laid off 34 employees, a few months after it made a cut of a similar size. And Henegan Construction Co., an interiors firm that has created Manhattan offices for major banks, is letting 55 workers go as it prepares to permanently close later this year.

Legally-required notices about the layoffs at both companies appeared recently in a state Department of Labor public database.

Founded by Yaakov Zar and Sammy Greenwall in 2019, Lev uses artificial-intelligence technology to match borrowers looking to purchase commercial buildings with thousands of lenders. The firm reportedly helped originate about $1 billion in mortgages in 2021. Lev makes its money by charging fees for transactions on its platform.

BY C.J. HUGHES BUCK

Along the way, the company, which is based on Spring Street, also seemed to become a darling of venture capitalists. A Series A round in 2021 hauled in $30 million, and a Series B round last year nabbed $70 million, according to startup-charting website Crunchbase. Lev’s in-

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vestors have included Cross River Digital Ventures, Parker89 and Canaan Partners. An email and phone message left with the company went unreturned. But last spring Zar told the website AlleyWatch he was expecting to expand. “Our volume is quickly increasing, and I know that we can be doing more to help our clients close even faster with a higher certainty of execution on

Real Estate

It’s official: Century 21 sets reopening date

BY EDDIE SMALL

The grand reopening of Century 21’s flagship store in the Financial District will be May 16, according to a spokeswoman for the company.

The department store was previously expected to reopen as soon as April 25, but it remained closed through the end of the month. A source then told Crain’s that it could reopen during the first week of May.

The revamped store should span 100,000 square feet across four floors.

The Gindi family owns the company, which had filed for bankruptcy protection and shuttered all of its 13 locations throughout New York, New Jersey, Florida and Pennsylvania in 2020 as the pandemic upended the retail industry.

The family then had a winning bid of $9 million for the brand’s intellectual property at an auction. They announced plans to reopen the Financial District’s flagship store at 22 Cortlandt St. last May. ■ more optimized terms,” he said then.

The company had about 100 employees in December before it laid off about 30 workers, according to news reports.

Henegan, meanwhile, is laying off its entire staff as it prepares to cease operations in August, according to its state filing. Founded in 1959 and based on West 30th Street near Penn Station, the family-owned firm is in its second generation of leadership. Its chief executive is Maureen Henegan, who took over in 1991 from her father, company founder Paul Henegan.

Clients have included Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, and projects have involved office towers in both Manhattan and New Jersey, according to Henegan’s website.

Another client was cloud-computing giant Salesforce, for which Henegan constructed a full-floor office at the high-rise 3 Bryant Park, which is at 1095 Sixth Ave. in Midtown.

Henegan had no comment.

Tech companies and banks have both downsized their office footprints in recent years. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, shrank by 400,000 square feet in 2022 and 300,000 square feet in 2020. And San Francisco-based Salesforce has announced that it will cut 8,000 workers in 2023 and get rid of some office space.

In the first quarter of this year, Manhattan’s office availability rate climbed to 17.1%, up from 16.9% in the fourth quarter, and among its highest level in decades, according to the brokerage Colliers. ■