A New York landlord is learning the hard way that you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure after his former business partner and girlfriend filed a lawsuit against him seeking $500,000 for breaches of contract and restitution.
The suit, raised by Douglas Elliman agent Vesna Todorov out of Palm Beach, alleges that her ex-lover Michael Speiser kept her on the hook for years as he promised to leave his wife for her and used her to make real estate deals in South Florida.
Speiser and Todorov met in New York around May 2010, according to the suit, filed earlier this week in New York Supreme Court. The landlord and interior designer quickly hit it off and began dating, despite Spieser being married with children.
The two even began living together full-time in a Palm Beach apartment, while Speiser continually delayed his promises to divorce his wife. Todorov, who was not working at the time, became restless and wanted to start earning her own income, according to the suit.
Speiser proposed they begin investing in real estate together: Todorov would earn her Realtor’s license and identify properties for them to invest in, and Speiser would fund the transactions.
As part of the agreement, she was to get a commission from the purchase as well as a piece of whatever the property sold for when they flipped it, according to the suit, first reported by the New York Daily News.
With Tadorov as his broker, Speiser bought a $1.775 million unit at 350 South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach and a flashy $3.7 million unit at the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Miami.
The suit alleges that Speiser later pocketed part of Tadorov’s $37,800 commission for the Palm Beach unit and told her she wouldn’t get anything when the Ritz-Carlton unit was eventually sold.
On top of that, Speiser picked up a new broker girlfriend when Todorov left for a few weeks in 2014. He kicked her out of his properties and refused to return all of her belongings, the suit alleges.
Ziel Feldman’s HFZ Capital has tapped Alicia Goldstein, a former executive vice president at Faena Group, to be the company’s senior managing director and president of sales and marketing.
The newly created position will see Goldstein, a veteran of the Related Companies, bring HFZ’s latest development, a mixed-use office, retail and residential project at 76 11th Avenue, to market.
Goldstein was at Faena, the firm led by Argentinian developer Alan Faena and partner Len Blavatnik, for three years. During her tenure, she spearheaded the company’s U.S. expansion, and launched sales at Faena House, a high-end condominium project in Miami Beach. The building’s penthouse recently sold for $60 million to billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin.
Feldman said that Goldstein “will help us with projects already underway, while positioning and bringing to market a variety of future developments including plans for 76 Eleventh Avenue where she’ll work closely with BIG, the architecture firm we’ve engaged to design the full block site.”
Nir Meir, a principal at HFZ, noted how unusual it was for a company of HFZ’s size to bring such a significant name in marketing in-house.
“Usually, these people represent developers on behalf of the big marketing firms like Elliman and Corcoran,” he said. “No one, except for the likes of Related, has really brought anyone of that caliber in-house.”
Meir said HFZ, which will work with Elliman on the 11th Avenue project, has not yet decided if it will bring sales and marketing efforts entirely in-house in the future.
Goldstein was formerly a senior vice president and the head of nationwide condo marketing for the Related Companies, where she worked on the Residences at Time Warner Center, the Brompton, Superior Ink and the Caledonia. She also marketed properties across the country, including Viceroy Snowmass and Snowmass Base Village in Colorado and the Century in Los Angeles.
HFZ has been one of the most active developers in the city over the past year.
Its residential pipeline also includes a 64-story, nearly 800-foot-tall condo tower at 8-16 West 30th Street in NoMad and a condominium conversion at the Belnord rental building, at 225 West 86th Street.