The Empire Builder Strikes Back

by Andrew Myers | Angeleno magazine | January 26, 2012

Young real estate Jedis, look not into the overleveraged black hole and despair. Rather, set the navigation on your leased BMWs to solar system Paligroup, where Palihouse—the 36-room WeHo hotel hot spot that blazed into existence in 2008—is spinning off two new orbiting bodies: Palihotel, a midscale (approximately $150-$250 per night), 32-room hotel on Melrose (with a Miami location in the works); and Paliliving in West Hollywood, a residential property set to open later this year. In this universe, the comely, quick-talking Avi Brosh is the proverbial Yoda figure who, despite market mayhem, has managed to regain the Force.

Born light-years away in New Jersey, schooled at Boston University, and trained in such divergent L.A. trenches as the William Morris mailroom and various residential real estate development concerns, Brosh built hundreds of “living units” while developing his specialty as an urban residential home builder before breaking mental ground on Palihouse in 2004. “I figured instead of always selling what I’d build, why not furnish everything, add a cool lobby and restaurant and make a place where studios of the old days might have housed their stars and starlets,” he says.

Then the market turned against him. But while imminent plans for Palihouses in Hollywood, Venice, Palm Springs and New York had to be jettisoned, Brosh cut his losses and is now building again. “I feel like both a grizzled hospitality veteran and the kid in the cubicle of my first job in real estate,” he says. “There’s nothing I’m doing now that I wasn’t doing 15 years ago—except, of course, I have 15 more years of experience.”