Why Bill Ackman Bought Rothschild Boulevard

Bill Ackman didn’t just buy an apartment in Tel Aviv. He bought Rothschild Boulevard as a macro bet on Israel.

The $20 million he paid for a Six Senses—branded apartment at Rothschild 10 will be written up as a luxury real estate trade. It isn’t. It is the most public expression yet of a thesis Ackman has been quietly building since 2024 — when he and his wife Neri Oxman acquired roughly 5% of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange for around $25 million, a position he later called “probably the best investment I’ve ever made.”

The apartment is the cleanest expression of that thesis.

I was on the original team at 36 Rothschild

When Richard Meier’s tower broke ground in 2010, my colleagues and I were pricing units at numbers the Israeli market had not seen. Inside the room: too aggressive. Outside the room: where do I sign. We sold Meier on Rothschild floor by floor to buyers out of Geneva, Moscow, New York, São Paulo, Sydney. They were not chasing the building. They were buying the boulevard.

That market never softened. It compounded through every cycle since — through political turbulence, currency volatility, three regional wars, and a pandemic. Each time the consensus assumed Tel Aviv luxury would crack. Each time it didn’t.

Ackman is buying into the same pattern at the new high-water mark.

Why Rothschild is unlike any other address in Israel

There are wealthy streets in Tel Aviv. There is one Rothschild Boulevard.

The boulevard runs through the heart of the White City — UNESCO World Heritage since 2003, the original 1909 Ahuzat Bayit settlement that grew into Tel Aviv itself. Independence Hall sits on it. The State of Israel was declared inside it on May 14, 1948. The country has one founding street. This is it.

Economically, Rothschild is Israel’s only residential address that holds real value through every cycle. Culturally, it is the white-Bauhaus spine of the city — protected, finite, irreplaceable. Symbolically, it is the address that says something about who you are, where you sit in the global Jewish economy, and what you believe about Israel’s long arc.

You cannot build a second one.

Ackman is not the first

In 2008, Gerry Schwartz — founder of Canada’s Onex Corporation — and his wife Heather Reisman, founder of Indigo, bought the neglected Beit Naparsteg at Rothschild 48. They restored it and reopened it as the R48 Hotel and Garden, an eleven-suite Bauhaus boutique property run with R2M Group — the operators behind Hotel Montefiore, the city’s first true upscale boutique hotel.

Schwartz did then, on Rothschild 48, what Ackman is doing now at Rothschild 10 — taking a position on the boulevard that doubles as a public statement about Israel.

The names are different. The trade is the same.

What I learned at Meier that still applies

The buyer profile on Rothschild has not changed in fifteen years.

They are not buying square meters. They are buying a postcode that operates as a credential. They are not timing the market. They are taking the apartment. They are not asking what the building will trade for in two years. They are asking what owning an address on Rothschild Boulevard says about them — to their family, their peers, and themselves.

We saw that buyer at Meier. Today’s buyer pool is wider. Hedge fund founders. Branded-residence trophies. Family offices unwinding European real estate as the geopolitical map shifts. The next wave — and we are already seeing early signs of it — is likely to be the first generation of Israeli AI fortunes, the founders building inside the LLM era, who are starting to look up at the boulevard from their offices in Sarona and Kiryat Atidim.

The names change. The calculation does not.

What to watch closely

Three signals are likely to shape where Rothschild trades from here.

• The Six Senses opening, now slated for 2027. Once the property opens, the Rothschild 10 residences are likely to re-trade in the secondary market and the comparable set could reset higher.
• European Jewish capital flows. Since 2023, a quiet repositioning of European Jewish family wealth into Tel Aviv has been underway. Rothschild is the destination address, and volume could build materially if the pattern continues.
• The next branded project on the boulevard. A second international hospitality brand — Aman, Bulgari, Mandarin — would likely place Rothschild in a tier of global luxury streets from which it does not come down.

None of these is certain. All three are worth watching closely.

Ackman bought the headline. Rothschild Boulevard is the story.

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Dan Peretz is a Tel Aviv–based real estate executive and contributor to The Olam. He was part of the original development team for the Meier on Rothschild Tower at 36 Rothschild Boulevard.