Northwell employee launches health real estate firm

Philip Silverman has announced he's stepping down from his position as chief physical assets officer at Northwell Health to launch Blue Sky Real Estate Services, a company that aims to serve health care providers, educational institutions and nonprofits across the country.

The company, which will be based in Midtown, already has eight employees and has signed Northwell as its first client, Silverman said.

"At the time I joined Northwell, less than a third of its strategic assets were long-term-controlled," he said. "We were a tenant at prevailing market rates to a bunch of landlords without any real strategy around the portfolio. Today more than 70% of our assets are long-term-controlled or owned."

Silverman previously served as vice president for real estate at Columbia University, where he managed to combine 64 parcels of property "from people who didn't want to sell them" to assemble a 17-acre site for Columbia's Manhattanville campus expansion.

Blue Sky has financial backing from investors, although Silverman would not reveal how much or from whom. "Among the funders are the co-founder and former chief operating officer of a financialservices firm that manages $13 billion in assets and the owners of a family business with significant Northeast real estate holdings," he said. —C.L.