Episode 54: Michael Shvo - Chairman and CEO of SHVO

**Amir Fischer** (0:01)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Michael Shvo, founder and CEO of Shvo, and one of the most visionary builders in luxury real estate today. At 23 years old, Michael landed in New York from Israel with $3,000 to his name. He started by managing a fleet of taxis, and within a decade, he had become the top broker at Douglas Elliman, doing over $300 million in sales across more than 400 deals. He left to found Shvo in 2004, and within four years, had done billions in transactions worldwide. He pioneered the marriage of fashion and real estate, bringing Armani to residential development before anyone else, and built a firm that now overseas more than $8 billion in assets across New York, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His portfolio includes some of the most iconic addresses in the country, 711 Fifth Avenue, the Crown Building, Bidregg in Chicago, the Mandarin Oriental Residences, properties defined not just by scale, but by the art, architecture, and culture woven into every one of them.
In our conversation, we talked about arriving in America with nothing, building one of the most recognized names in luxury real estate, what he actually means when he talks about luxury and much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast on Reddit, 5 Stars, and Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable. I really enjoyed having this conversation with Michael, and I hope you guys enjoy listening. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael, for coming on. I really appreciate it.

**Michael Shvo** (1:17)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

**Amir Fischer** (1:19)
Well, I want to start where I always do, the beginning. Tell me about your childhood. I'm correct, you grew up in Arasuf, Israel, son of two chemistry professors. What was that environment like? What kind of kid were you? Tell me all about it.

**Michael Shvo** (1:30)
It's a good question. My memory doesn't go far. It doesn't go that far. But my parents were academics. They were both organic chemists teaching in Tel Aviv University, and then a year in Stanford, and a year at Yale. That's when I first came to the States, 1978 and 1979, which really was the premise of what brought me back here, the American dream as a kid, a six-year-old kid in 1978, when Israel was a very undeveloped country and coming to America, coming to New York, seeing the building, seeing everything, the technology at the time, it was magical.
That's where we started, where my love affair with the United States started, and a little bit with real estate. But as a kid, I was a problematic kid, wasn't really good with authority then.
We grew up in a place where it was far away from school, so it's not like I could walk away and see friends and things of that nature. So obviously shaped me in a specific way. But then that's through my childhood and then ended up, obviously, in Israel, you go to the army. I served in the army three years, and I studied a bit. I got kicked out of high school. I was, as I said, not best with authority as a kid. Ended up in the United States after I made a lot of money as a kid. As a very young kid, I started trading stocks with nothing, with a few thousand dollars, made millions of dollars as a kid, millions.

**Amir Fischer** (3:03)
Wow.

**Michael Shvo** (3:04)
I was on gas and oil stocks in Israel, which just doesn't exist. Yeah. Well, really in Israel now, they discovered gas.
But the punctuation with the stocks was really high, and I figured the trade there, and one day I lost everything as expected, which was the biggest blessing in that sense. Got on the plane the next day, had $3,000 of cash in my pocket, ended up in the United States.

**Amir Fischer** (3:33)
From there, if I'm correct, you start managing a fleet of taxis. Why not go back into trading? Why is that the first step?

**Michael Shvo** (3:39)
I had no money. I was sleeping on the floor in Harlan. I was sleeping in a guy's house on the floor in Harlan. And I got to the airport, I took a cab to this guy's house and I said, how does this taxi thing work? And he explained to me, there's a medallion, there's a car. I ended up buying one Crown Victoria. You're too young to know what a Crown Victoria is, but it's in the old yellow cabs that you see in the movies, in the very old movies. And I leased the medallion and I subleased the car and the medallion to two drivers by shifts. And I made a big...