They are two figures that speak volumes about New York City real estate barons the LeFraks: 34 million square feet and 100 years.

The first is the size of their portfolio easily twice that of Donald Trump’s and the second, the length of time the family historically has held on to its assets.

One other thing: The family is heading west and plans to elbow its way into the Los Angeles market with at least 1 million square feet of real estate.

“That’s for starters, and we are going to continue to do it over a long period of time and our whole timeline is about 100 years,” said Jamie LeFrak, who at 34 is managing director of LeFrak Organization Inc. and the fourth generation in the family business. “That’s when we will reconsider.”

The LeFraks made a splash this year by paying top dollar for two expensive local assets, marking a shift away from the brick, working-class apartment and office buildings the family built its reputation on in New York and New Jersey.

In August the family purchased an office building in Hollywood for $50 million and in June it paid $80 million for the tallest office building in Beverly Hills. And they did it in a fashion consistent with how they built their East Coast real estate empire: paying cash.

Now, the family has its eyes on other assets in its Westside target area. That could well include residential properties in addition to commercial real estate.

But they are entering the local market at a time of uncertainty. Commercial builders are having difficulty obtaining credit to build new projects, and the residential rental market is in limbo, with the for-sale side whacked by the subprime meltdown that began earlier this year. Sky high valuations even in the commercial sector are likely heading down.

Still, local real estate players watching the action aren’t prepared to place any bets against the LeFraks.

“You have a lineage and a bloodline that has been in real estate for north of a century,” said Bob Safai of Madison Partners, who represented the seller, Broadstone Hollywood LLC, in the transaction for the 175,000-square-foot tower at 7060 Hollywood Blvd. “Their horizon is generational. You are talking 100 years and a multi, multi billion dollar family with assets all over New York City who are now expanding to the West Coast. There are only a handful of people in the country like that.”

Post 9/11

The family business is run by Richard LeFrak and his sons Jamie and Harrison, 35. Richard LeFrak, 62, is the son of the late Samuel J. LeFrak, the flashy tycoon who led the family business for decades after taking over from his father, Harry LeFrak, the founder of the 106-year-old business.

Locally, Jamie LeFrak has the best institutional knowledge of the L.A. marketplace because he worked here for two years in the late 1990s for commercial real estate company Trizec Properties Inc., now part of Brookfield Properties Corp., before joining the family business.

But that doesn’t mean he was the one trying to sell his father and brother on the L.A. market. In fact, it was Sept. 11 that prompted the family to consider investing here, Jamie LeFrak said.

“(It) made us take a pause and say, ‘Boy we should really consider having a business platform outside of one place.’ There were many years of debate, discussion and exploration, probably many years in which we should have been buying things instead of talking about it,” he said. “We went to a lot of places and had a lot of ideas but in the end L.A. turned out to be the best and not because I had spent time here.”

The family, which also plans to get into the London market, but has no holdings there yet, chose Los Angeles over cities like Boston, Miami, Chicago and San Francisco after deciding the Westside had the strongest long-term real estate market.

“Los Angeles is the best other market for real estate besides New York; you just have to understand the geography and the way land lays out here,” said Jamie LeFrak, who has impeccable academic credentials, attending Princeton as an undergraduate, followed up by a masters in civil engineering from M.I.T.

“West L.A. has a tremendous clustering of wealth and the wealth chooses to locate itself in these naturally determined locations, the beach and the hills. The most valuable properties are always the ones most proximate to the hills or the beach.”

Of course, acquiring prime Westside properties is not easy, given the strong demand for it, even if it sometimes can seem overpriced. But as the family continues to look at more properties, it likely will come across sellers who appreciate the LeFraks’ ability to do cash deals.

“They do what they say and say what they do,” said Safai, who noted the cash purchase of the Hollywood building. “I think they have the capacity to do what some other buyers in a fragmented market can’t do.”

Carl Muhlstein, executive vice president at Cushman & Wakefield Inc., said he’s shown the family properties, and he’s noticed that sellers seem to understand that the LeFraks aren’t just window shopping.

“I think they might have been off the radar screen but several years ago the family started making a lot of trips out west and started shopping,” said Muhlstein, who brokers the sales of large commercial real estate transactions. “They are definitely known now.”

Top dollar

The two local assets the company currently owns are certainly flashy affairs.

The LeFraks bought the Beverly Hills office building at 9701 Wilshire Blvd. in the city’s “Golden Triangle” from Kennedy-Wilson Inc. on a so-called 1031 exchange, in which they got a tax deferral on the sale of a residential property in New York City.

The 12-story, 111,165-square-foot building is 100 percent occupied and the LeFraks keep a small, modest office there that Jamie LeFrak uses on his twice-monthly visits to the city. The deal for the building, where City National Bank is the marquee tenant, broke down to a high $720 per foot.

“Most people would say it was expensive,” acknowledged Jamie LeFrak, adding the family has a “special affinity” for Beverly Hills.

The company doesn’t plan to do much with the building, other than lease out about 20,000 square feet a considerable and rare vacancy for Beverly Hills when it comes online next year. The asking rental rate will be somewhere in the $5 per foot per month range.

But at the company’s Hollywood property, big changes are planned to take advantage of the community’s resurgence and lack of office space. Since purchasing that 12-story, 175,000-square-foot tower, the LeFraks have set out to reposition the vacant property, which the previous owner had originally planned to convert into a condominium tower.

The LeFraks plan to upgrade the fa & #231;ade of the drab building, and will revamp all of the building’s systems. The final demolition of the building’s interior is underway, with office tenants moving in possibly by the end of 2008.

“It’s like building a brand new building except you already have the superstructure, but the superstructure isn’t up to seismic code so we have to improve that, too,” said Jamie LeFrak.

The building will be marketed to entertainment and technology tenants, and it will include ground floor retail space and a “signature restaurant.” Local firm Nadel Architects Inc. is handling the remodel.

“Everybody came back to Hollywood or wants to come back to Hollywood,” Jamie LeFrak said. “There is a sentiment in the entertainment industry that says, ‘We want to come back.’ We are attracting a lot of entertainment tenants.”

Moving forward

Locally, the missing piece for the company is residential, the bread and butter of the Lefrak Organization’s business. The family’s most famous development is LeFrak City, a gigantic Queens residential project that includes 20 18-story buildings. The 1959 project includes 2 million square feet of retail space and is home to about 15,000 people in 5,000 apartments.

Clearly, the LeFraks won’t be able to build a similar project or something even half the size on the Westside.

“In the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County there are no very large tracts of land that would accept a large high-rise, high density multifamily residential project,” said Mark Tarczynski, a senior vice president at CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., who specializes in brokering large land deals for residential development. “They are here a little late, unless they want to do it out in Ontario and I know that’s not going to happen.”

Tarczynski said that the only local multifamily development that might compare to the LeFraks’ holdings in New York is Miracle Mile’s Park La Brea project, which includes 4,000 apartments and sits on 160 acres. It’s not on the market, but it’s the kind of project the LeFraks would love to do.

“I hope we can find something in that scale. For us that would be awesome to find something big like that,” said Jamie LeFrak.

For now, the family is staying away from downtown Los Angeles where lots of high-density, vertical apartment and condominium buildings are being constructed because it wants to focus solely on West Los Angeles.

And the market, for all its strength, will need the full attention of the family. Though the LeFraks certainly have cash on hand, business here could still be impacted by the unrest that clouds the real estate market. Since August, the commercial market has been unsteady, with whispers slowly spreading of projects losing funding as banks deal with the subprime collapse.

But Los Angeles’ relative disassociation with the financial services firms of New York City could make it an attractive alternative to doing business in the company’s home base. While layoffs in the financial services industry could result in a depression in New York real estate values, that wouldn’t be the case here, where the entertainment business is the biggest game in town, or so the family thinks.

“The fact that the financial services firms might have a bad week has nothing to do with whether people in Thailand watched the dubbed version of ‘Shrek’ today,” said Jamie LeFrak. “It’s rewarding in terms of the decision we made. It makes us feel good knowing that while New York at the moment is seeing uneasiness with what is going on in the financial services sector, here I don’t think they are running out of computer programmers to make the next video game.”