UL Interview: Stefan Soloviev

Tattooed, tanned, and tousled, 48-year-old Stefan Quinn Soloviev looks like an athletic nerd who stepped out of a Mad Max film, but don’t let his appearance fool you. Soloviev is one of the largest landowners in the United States—number 21, according to Landreport.com—with a portfolio that includes some of Manhattan’s most coveted properties.

Scion of the late developer Sheldon Solow, Soloviev was only 22 when he reclaimed the full Russian surname of his grandfather Isaac and moved to Phoenix, parting ways for a time with his irascible father.

Soloviev Group

Fascinated by commodities, and grain in particular, Soloviev transitioned from trading crops to owning land, acquiring large farms and cattle ranches in windy, drought-prone areas of the Midwest. He collaborated with a seed company to create drought-tolerant corn, bought railroads to deliver crops faster, and cut deals with wind and solar companies to generate renewable power.

Eventually returning to New York at his father’s behest, Soloviev took over operations of a portfolio of luxury residential towers with 1,495 apartments. After Solow passed away in 2020, Soloviev was forced to sell all but one of the apartment buildings to pay estate taxes, but he kept the trophy office tower at 9 West 57th Street, along with a development site across the street, plus nearly seven vacant acres south of the United Nations complex.

Urban Land: After your father passed away, you sold most of the residential towers in 2022 for $1.75 billion. How did that come about?

Soloviev: When I took over the buildings, they were at 65 percent occupancy and I got them up to 97 percent.

I had run the residential buildings and worked with my father for 20 years, but zero planning went into my father’s estate. The residential sale helped to clean up the estate. We sold the residential properties before the interest rates went up, and I have one left—[Rivers Bend, with 171 units at 501 E. 87th Street,] the first one my father built on the Upper East Side.

UL: You were able to keep 9 West 57th Street, a 1.6 million-square-foot (14,8644.9 sq m) commercial office tower that overlooks Central Park and is one of the top office properties in New York, with tenants that include Chanel and Apollo. Your father, as you well know, could be very curmudgeonly and even sued many tenants. How did you change that reputation and turn around the property?

Soloviev: My father was always wild at work, from the time I was a kid—he settled down the last 10 years—but it was easy to have a falling out.

There was a lot of mending fences with the tenants, potential tenants, and the brokerages. I go on the tours with the brokers and tenants, and I am giving my all to my tenants and working well with the brokers.

I took the vacancy from 30 percent to 10 percent, and occupancy is now crossing 96 percent, and it is the hottest address in the city. It’s the best commercial building in the world—in amenities, for services, and for prioritizing the tenants. Obviously, we’ve now taken the vacancy down to next to nothing, with some of the highest rents in the city.

I put $45 million into amenity spaces. It was necessary, and it’s never been as full, and had never reached 100 percent [occupancy].

The 27th floor is a [tenant] amenity floor with a full [Central] Park view, and you can have coffee there for breakfast or host 150 people without leaving the building.

We revamped and redid the elevator cabs and relit the lobby and put in personal touches with plants.

The basement is now an 11,000-square-foot (1,022 sq m) full fitness center with a cold plunge pool and a hot pool, and it’s a gym you won’t see anywhere else. There’s also a big skylight that brings in natural light.

And it goes with the taste and the address.

Nine West has been so much fun, but it was an uphill battle cleaning up the city region.

UL: You own a big development site across 57th Street—also known as Biliionaire’s Row—with about 240 feet of frontage. What are your plans for that?

Soloviev: People are always calling me to see if I’m going to sell it, but we are keeping it, and it’s all about protecting the southern views from 9 West. We have a plan but I’m not announcing it yet.

UL: Your city region also includes what is, for New York, a huge, 6.7-acre (2.7 ha) site just south of the United Nations, between First Avenue and the FDR Drive by the East River. Your father bought that former power plant site for $600 million and obtained approvals for a hotel and three residential buildings. But you’ve now partnered with Mohegan as one of a dozen groups hoping to win one of the three downstate casino licenses. What do you now envision for that site?

Soloviev: That’s Freedom Plaza, where we want to build two hotels, one of which is a 1,250-room hotel with an underground casino and massive underground parking garage, a museum, and affordable housing. Our plan has five to 10 times more affordable housing than our competition. There will be 4.8 acres (1.9 ha) dedicated to community uses as a green space—open park.

UL: What happens if you don’t get the casino license?

Soloviev: I’m in it to win it.

UL: How did you end up buying so much land out west and founding Crossroads Agriculture in 1999?

Soloviev: When I left for Arizona, I had changed my name to Soloviev, and it was partly to differentiate myself from my father. Futures really excited me because you can have an account worth $100, and it could be worth minus $1,000 the next day.

The first commodity I bought was sugar, and then for about five years I only did currency and metals.

Then I started to notice grains. I started noticing the arbitrage between July and December—those massive 10 percent jumps. You could borrow money and make it happen.

I was getting obsessed with grain, and Wichita was the center of it. After my father asked me to come back to New York, I moved my [land] operation to Scottsbluff, Nebraska. But we had a massive, massive argument, and I stayed in [the Hamptons] for that whole year, just trading, and then I came back in at age 29.

UL: But you amassed hundreds of thousands of acres.

Soloviev: I bought a lot of land. I opened that market when it was at the right time, and Farm Credit backed me.

Most of my loans are federally subsidized, and that’s what helped me expand. Every cent I had went into farmland—nothing else. I mean everything.

UL: Why did you buy land where you don’t get enough rain?

Soloviev: In years when it rains, our soils are as good as [soil] anywhere else. We just don’t get the rain other people do. The area that we picked in the United States has droughts. Corn wasn’t in our area 20 years ago, and now it’s everywhere—because of drought-tolerant seeds.

UL: You now harvest 3 million bushels of wheat, 3 million bushels of milo, and another 1 million bushels of corn for domestic and international sales. But you’re also competing with big conglomerates. What are you doing to differentiate your companies—Crossroads Agriculture and Weskan Grain—to get the grain you need?

Soloviev: First I bought a 120-mile-long condemned [railway] line, the Colorado Pacific Railroad. That gave me my siding that can hold an entire unit train of 110 cars. [All the cars in a unit train carry the same product.] We also bought the 150-mile Colorado Pacific Rio Grande in the San Luis Valley.

We’ve accumulated a lot of land, and now I can give it back to the farmers.

UL: What do you mean you can give it back to the farmers?

Soloviev: I could, alone, fill up maybe six unit trains a year, these 110-car trains, myself. But I built Weskan Grain, and it will soon hold 7 million bushels—plus we have satellite facilities, and now I want everyone else’s grain.

If I give them 1,000 acres [to lease], I’m hoping to get 10,000 acres of production [from their other land], and by giving them the 1,000 acres now, they get it, they have to take a risk. You are renting the farms back to the farmers at a good rate.

This year is going to be my last harvest, because everything is now leased out to the area farmers.

Then, when I have ships, I will be able to cut deals and transport the grains from our Weskan Grain facilities directly to Asia.

UL: As a New Yorker, how have you been overcoming their natural prejudices?

Soloviev: I’m on the ground there every other week if they want me. They know I farm, but there are a lot of people that didn’t like me. To a lot of people, I’m an outsider—I get it, I have a Russian last name, and they call me “The Russian” or “The New Yorker”—there’s kind of like a stigma.

Everyone’s heard of me, so when I go to their living room, there’s a little bit of hesitation.

Sometimes, it’s someone I’ve never met before, but within five minutes, I’m talking about things in the grain industry that are wrong, and they are agreeing with that.

We’re a Weskan company‚ we’re all about western Kansas and eastern Colorado—so we’re a local company.

UL: You have already cut deals to add wind and solar to a lot of your land. Public records show that the turbine companies pay an average of $42,000 for each one while solar pays an average of $500 per acre. Can your renewable energy co-exist with the grain and cattle operations?

Soloviev: That’s why this farmland is cheap, but that’s where the wind is, and the wind turbines. I have solar and wind companies that have leased everything I have, except for a little bit of acreage in New Mexico.

Instead of buying small acreage that can support more cows, we were buying mass acreage in the windiest place in America. We hit home runs on every turbine that is put on our property. We want as many turbines as we can get, because they’ll make us more money than any grain you can grow.

I’m not going to discuss pricing but the private company, Invenergy, based in Chicago, already has 42 approved for our land in Colorado.

There’s also a Florida company, NextEra Energy, and you can’t farm around the solar, but you also can’t make $500 per acre on crops.

UL: In New York, your Atlantic Region of Crossroads Agriculture owns hundreds of acres on eastern Long Island, with about 20 different companies, ranging from vineyards to a small hotel and winery, peach orchards, an apiary, a marina, Christmas tree farms, nurseries, cattle, and I believe you are also starting a landscape company and a construction company, right?

Soloviev: Greenwave Landscape & Design is the full-service landscaping company that I’m going to also bring down to Florida. We’re just launching it in the Hamptons, and we’ll have all the options to give everyone what they want. You will have the option for your property to be organic.

We have about 1,000 acres (404.6 ha), and we will build some homes—but tastefully. I am aware of the importance of preserving open space, so the majority of our farmland [on Long Island] is going to be vineyards for our wine company, Krissie Vineyards.

UL: How do you see organic farming being incorporated into your farming methods?

Soloviev: [That’s] what everybody is concerned about—pesticides and spraying and organic food and non-organic food. [Soon] we’re not going to have to spray anything, because there will be robots with lasers spraying everything … and killing it with a laser.

It’s not efficient right now, but if you wait five years, we will have this whole thing fixed. Don’t get on farmers right now. You need conventional agriculture for people to survive.

Once it’s efficient, once it works in our programs, I’m more than happy to use it.

Everything [we do] is about the long game.