AKAM Living Services

AKAM Living Services

AKAM Living Services was formed in 1995 as the property management arm through which Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, would steward the residential real estate holdings of his family office. Rather than functioning solely as an internal cost center, it was deliberately structured to compete for and win third-party management contracts, a departure from the typical insular model of single-family offices. The pivot transformed the entity into a revenue-generating operating company that sits alongside the allocative function of the broader family capital. The firm's core strategy is operationally intensive, focused on white-glove residential property management, co-op and condo governance, and luxury rental oversight. Asset classes directly managed include high-end residential towers, cooperative housing corporations, and condominium associations. AKAM does not operate as a fund or a discretionary allocator; instead, the family office's distinct investment posture is filtered through a service-delivery platform that collects fees from external property owners. Geographic concentration is tight—rooted in New York City with a second major node in South Florida—treating these two markets as a barbell of gateway urban density and coastal luxury living. By 2006 AKAM was among the largest residential property managers in New York, and the trajectory accelerated after Lutnick's use of the firm to support recovery logistics following the 9/11 attacks that devastated Cantor Fitzgerald. The team is currently led by CEO Michael Rogoff, who has overseen expansion beyond the initial Manhattan core. Adjacent vehicles include equity positions held directly by the Lutnick family in many of the buildings AKAM manages, creating an alignment of interest where the property manager is also a fellow owner. May 2024: AKAM announced the adoption of a proprietary ESG benchmarking framework across its managed portfolio, designed to measure energy and water efficiency at the building level (per the firm's official communications). The structural differentiator is the embedded operating-company model: unlike a typical family office that co-invests passively alongside external GPs, AKAM is a frontline service business with thousands of employees. This converts the family's real-asset exposure into a platform that generates management fees from other wealthy New Yorkers. It creates an unusual succession architecture as well, because any future leadership transition involves not just the custodian of liquid capital but also a going-concern operating entity with its own client relationships and P&L.