Fairstead co-founder Will blodgett leaves the company to create a new real estate investment company, called Tredway, learned Commercial Observer.
Like Fairstead, Tredway will focus on acquiring, preserving and developing affordable housing across the country. Blodgett noted that he had built or preserved 30,000 apartments in the past 10 years and that he hoped to double or triple that number over the next decade. As to where he’s looking to invest, “we’re going to be geographically agnostic,” he said. Fairstead owned approximately 14,000 apartments in 18 states as of May 2021.
He told Commercial Observer he left Fairstead in September hoping to focus on “a new challenge.” He added: “I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built there, and I’m just so excited to go and climb my own mountain.” The 38-year-old declined to comment further on his departure from the company he co-founded seven years ago with Jeffrey Goldberg after passing through Related companies and the New York City Housing Authority.
Blodgett explained that he named his business “after Alfred Tredway White, who said that housing and its surroundings are the main component of upward social mobility. I am obsessed with solving the intricacies of housing people on a large scale in a high opportunity manner.
His tenure at Fairstead included converting the Park 79 Hotel on the Upper West Side in affordable senior housing, the $ 315 million acquisition and renovation of the Park Savoy Apartments in Harlem, and the acquisition and renovation of 1,200 Section 8 apartments across New York City. Fairstead did not immediately return a request for comment on Blodgett’s decision to leave.
White, who died in 1921, was a late 19th-century housing reformer and early Brooklyn Heights developers who built what he called “the world’s most advanced apartment buildings.” Its properties – which included toilets, fireplaces, and large windows in the unit – include the Riverside Apartments at the corner of Columbia Place and Joalemon Street, and the Cobble Hill Towers and Residential buildings in Baltic and Hicks streets. He also built the now exclusive Warren Place Mews, a row of workers’ cottages with a common English courtyard.
Rebecca Baird-Remba can be contacted at rbairdremba@commercialobserver.com.
