Before being New York, the great American metropolis was baptized by Dutch settlers as New Amsterdam. Three centuries later, that name crosses the Atlantic again, but to land in Barcelona. New Amsterdam Developments (NAD) is today one of the best-known – and at the same time most opaque – real estate companies. Their business model, which, according to neighbors, consists of expelling tenants from their homes who pay still reasonable rents to create colivings. Especially when the company has only imported to the city the practices that one of its partners has used in New York for three decades with his real estate agency Stone Street Properties, which has been taken to court for alleged harassment of tenants and non-payment of salaries and loans.
Txema Escorsa, a resident of the Gràcia neighborhood, managed to stop in the extremes his eviction last April and. The company has been emptying its property on Sant Agustí street and converting homes into colivings. That is, dividing apartments into rooms that they rent for a price higher than the rent that Escorsa pays. The , whose pressure allowed the eviction to be stopped, is now looking towards the emblematic Casa Papallona, another building also in the hands of that society located in Eixample. The organizations have just stopped an eviction, but now they fear for Marga, who is under an order to leave the apartment she has lived in for three decades. Many tenants tried to hold on to the government-approved rent extension, but now find themselves on uncertain ground after .
Behind NAD are the American businessman Jeffrey Todd Kaye and the Dutchman Paul Petermeijer, whose first joint business in the Catalan capital dates back to 2021. Then, they laid the first stone of the corporate framework that today operates under a business brand that expresses that conjunction of origins and that . They have been doing it in a much more secretive way than in the United States, where the million-dollar acquisitions of Stone Street Properties, owned by Kaye, were announced with great fanfare in industry magazines.
Kaye’s adventure in the North American metropolis began in 2011, when he founded that company with another partner. Just two years later, specialized magazines in the sector already placed Kaye in the list of owners of the central areas of Manhattan, subjected. The magazine The real deal described the business model: during the first years Kaye accumulated buildings that he later sold for a profit.
Among the buyers of those portfolios was Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who purchased a lot of 16 buildings for $132 million. It was then that the New York tenant associations exposed Kushner’s actions and, in the process, pointed out bad practices on the part of Kaye. The organizations Met Council Action and Fifth Avenue Committee denounced in their publications that Stone Street was responsible for emptying a good part of several rent-controlled buildings with offers, “false eviction notices” and incessant construction. Kushner then only had to find tenants for whom he more than doubled the rents.
EL PAÍS has contacted NAD to obtain its version of all those events – those in and Barcelona -, but the company has declined to speak. However, New York State court records from federal courts do contain several complaints against Kaye’s company. One of them, who advanced the middle The Directwas undertaken by a tenant, Heatheran Kristopher, who accused them of having been evicted for having cancer, but who was denied precautionary measures.
Another of the complaints in the registry was to a furniture and home goods store, Area ID, which accused the company of engaging in a “malicious pattern of intimidation and destruction” after acquiring . In the document, the plaintiffs accused the company of having “harassed” them from the beginning, among other things, with “demands for rent increases, massive flooding, dust and debris, electricity outages” or with “huge and unsightly garbage containers” that blocked access. The judicial process dragged on for almost a decade, until the parties decided not to move forward in 2024, according to the public record, where it is not specified whether they reached an out-of-court agreement.
Much of this is what the neighbors of . Anna Olesti, neighbor and spokesperson for the Socialist Housing Union of Catalonia, explains that as soon as they arrived, the owners sent burofaxes to all the neighbors asking them to leave the building. Half ended up doing it. “Then, without any prior communication, they started doing construction, raising dust, making noise,” explains Olesti. The neighbors regret that the maintenance of the property, classified as being of artistic and historical interest, is deficient. But the worst thing is that at the end of the road, there are threats of eviction. “We just want to renew the contracts. And I don’t know how, but I am very convinced that we are going to beat them,” she adds. The pattern described in Barcelona is very similar to that of New York. And also the objective: The company itself makes it clear on its Linkedin page: “high profitability” with “minimal risk.”
Right now, New Nomads – one of the companies in the network – has eight rooms announced. A bedroom in a six-bedroom apartment in Eixample, for example. The Generalitat has opened 529 files on companies, almost 80% for failing to comply with the limits set for rent, although only eight of them are sanctioning. According to neighbors, inspectors from the Generalitat have gone to several NAD buildings, including the one on Sant Agustí street and Casa Papallona.
Complaints from financial partners
Kaye’s partner in Barcelona, a priori, lacks that experience in the sector. Paul Petermeijer founded a magazine publishing house 30 years ago. marketing and electronic commerce in Utrecht and since 2017 he has already been linked to the Catalan capital as president of the American School of Barcelona and co-owner of Digestalia and later of NAD. According to market sources, Petermeijer is credited with opening doors where it has been able to enter. However, several people consulted in the sector by this newspaper deny knowing either of the two businessmen.
Kaye’s shining star now seems to be fading. In New York, the businessman has chained several complicated lawsuits. Two investment vehicles – HUSA E84 and HUSA 8283Q – owners of two properties managed by Kaye’s company denounced him in 2019 for “misappropriation of nearly half a million dollars” coming “from the funds” of those buildings, whose “management had been entrusted to him.” In 2020, a Revere Capital real estate fund claimed €42 million from him. According to the records, the judge determined that he had to face those amounts.
More complicated is the trial that is active today, in which the financial Community Preservation Corporation is urging the foreclosure of a property after the businessman’s company stopped paying despite “continuing to collect rents from the tenants of the mortgaged property”, accumulating a debt of 12.9 million euros. In Barcelona, the risk is different: the businessmen who have already warned that they do not plan to throw in the towel.
