DEVELOPMENT
THE RIGHT BRAIN OF LEFT LANE
A REAL ESTATE FIRM YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD OF BRINGS THE NOISE.
By DAVID EISEN
There’ s a fraternal quality to Left Lane Development. Its four partners all graduated together from Colgate University, which, although located in New York, is miles away from where the investment company is now headquartered: Manhattan. And though Left Lane calls the island home, it’ s making its mark in markets well outside it. Left Lane is not all Colgate grads. The vertically integrated company today employs 22 people and has its own operating arm in conjunction with Highgate, one of the largest third-party operators in the country. The company was launched in the throes of the pandemic, but, as Managing Partner Jon Kully related, it was something Left Lane leaned into. In fact, it made hay.“ It was awful,” he said of the period. But there was also opportunity.
The pandemic upended quotidian life, closing workplaces and making large gatherings verboten. Even when life reached some normalcy a couple years on, the world was irrevocably changed, where the five-day workweek dwindled or remained a work-from-home situation. This is where Left Lane saw its chance.
“ We knew that Class B office was the worst hit,” said Kully. Class B office buildings are a rung below Class A properties in terms of overall quality, amenities, location and, often, age, but are still
Jon Kully is managing partner of New Yorkbased Left Lane, a vertically integrated private equity fund launched in 2021.
58 hotelsmag. com July / August 2025