Richard Lefrak: The Real Estate Billionaire

Richard  Lefrak: The Real Estate Billionaire studied from Amherst College

The LeFrak Family – Jamie, Harrison & Richard

Richard Lefrak’s Net Worth is $ 3 Billion. Grandfather Harry started developing New York City real estate 1901. Father, Sam, became paragon of mass-market home building: "I produced an apartment every 16 minutes."

Richard studied at Amherst College, joined family business early 1970s; became chairman after dad died in 2003. Now runs company with 2 sons,

- Harrison and

- Jamie.

Portfolio includes 5,000 apartments at LeFrak City in Queens, N.Y., 7-million-square-foot-commercial, residential, retail complex in Newport, N.J. Expanding Newport project; $10 billion "mini-city" will soon include a new office tower, 429-room Westin hotel and 4,500 more apartments and condos. On board of the American Museum of Natural History.

Harry LeFrak, an immigrant, started building tenements on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1901. His only son, Sam, cranked out thousands of apartments across the city for working-class families. The most notable: LeFrak City in Queens, which opened in the early 1960s and offered one-bedrooms for $120 a month. "We weren't Rockefellers," says CEO Richard LeFrak. "My father [Sam] went around job sites picking up nails off the ground so he could reuse them."

Richard LeFrak and his two sons, Jamie and Harrison, began scouring for deals beyond New York a few years back, everywhere from London to Boston. They settled on Los Angeles, which has limited land for new construction.

In April 2008, the family paid $866 a square foot for a medical building in Beverly Hills—a record price for the city. Says Jamie LeFrak: "I want my great-grandson to say, 'Wow, you only paid $800 a square foot for that? It's worth $80,000 today.' "