Why Marc Rowan Assembled $30M North Fork Land Buy

Marc Rowan is assembling a North Fork empire

The Apollo CEO has spent roughly $30 million on more than 100 acres in East Marion. He says he has no plans to develop it — for now.

That has prompted the same obvious question asked whenever a billionaire starts buying large quantities of waterfront property: What exactly is he up to?

For the moment, Rowan, who’s been active in the North Fork before, says, not much. “It’s literally the one piece,” the Apollo Global Management CEO said in an interview, pushing back on the idea that he has embarked on a broader North Fork buying spree. “It’s one very large piece. It’s just the most beautiful piece I’ve seen in a really long time. So spectacular.”

Rowan’s Apollo has in the neighborhood of $1 trillion in assets under management and a market capitalization of about $68 billion. Rowan himself is worth $7 or 8 billion, per Forbes. He owns a Gin Lane home in Southampton, which he bought for $27 million in 2007.

But the centerpiece of Rowan’s North Fork holdings is the roughly 100 acres around Cove Beach in East Marion, acquired earlier this year for $23.5 million in what was the most expensive land sale in North Fork history. The acquisition consisted of 17 parcels purchased through a collection of LLCs bearing the less-than-romantic names NFH JC, NFH JC II, NFH JC III and so forth — because nothing evokes old potato fields and salt air quite like a Delaware LLC followed by Roman numerals.

The parcels stretch along the Long Island Sound near Stoney Beach and Cove Beach roads, just west of Truman’s Beach. Individual transactions ranged from $50,000 to $4.095 million.

Since 2024, entities tied to Rowan have also purchased three nearby properties for a combined $6.5 million, bringing the total assemblage to roughly 112 acres. But Rowan says the purchases should be viewed as one property rather than the beginnings of some vast North Fork empire. “You come across things that are generational,” he said. “This is like a half mile on the water. It’s as beautiful as it gets.”

And what does one do after spending tens of millions on a generational half-mile of Long Island waterfront? Apparently, wait.

“Right now there’s no plan to do anything,” Rowan said. “I’ll study it over a couple of years.”

He noted that the property is currently zoned for 16 lots, as it was before his purchase, but said he has no immediate intention of exercising those development rights.

“I have no plans to develop right now, no plans to do anything,” he said. That “right now” will presumably be of some interest to East Marion residents, who have already been keeping an eye on the property.

Rowan said neighbors have contacted local officials after noticing considerable activity on land that had been largely untouched for decades. But he said the trucks and dumpsters aren’t evidence that construction is quietly getting underway.

The place just needed a very large spring cleaning.

“This property sat idle for 50 years,” Rowan said. “It’s a dumping ground. There are old cars. So we’ve been cleaning it up.” Rowan said crews have removed “dumpster after dumpster after dumpster,” attracting enough attention that the planning board and building inspector have visited the site. “There’s nothing being done,” he said. “It’s literally just cleanup.”

Behind the neighbors’ concern is the fact that the North Fork has spent the past several years confronting the peculiar problems that arise when very rich people discover someplace that has remained comparatively unspoiled.

Developer Stefan Soloviev, for one, has amassed more than 1,000 acres in the area and proposed substantial residential projects, fueling an ongoing debate over just how much development the North Fork’s farms, vineyards and small hamlets can absorb before they become something else entirely.

Rowan insists his plans are considerably less ambitious. “Preserving the character of the area is very important to you?” this reporter asked him. “Yeah,” he replied. “That’s what we do everywhere.”

There are already significant limits on what can happen to much of the property.

Dutch businessman Raoul Witteveen, who owned a large portion of the land beginning in the 1990s, pursued an extensive conservation program there, and some 69 acres are protected by Peconic Land Trust easements.

The acreage also has an appropriately glamorous North Fork pedigree. Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley once owned about 70 acres there, buying it in 1985 and selling less than two years later. Various owners and developers have subsequently entertained plans for the site, most of which went nowhere.

Rowan, meanwhile, is hardly a stranger to the North Fork. He bought the former Orient by the Sea restaurant property in 2019 for $3.9 million and transformed it into Duryea’s Orient Point, the eastern outpost of his increasingly polished restaurant collection. He also owns Duryea’s in Montauk and Lulu Kitchen & Bar in Sag Harbor.

The Orient purchase famously wasn’t entirely intentional. Rowan previously told Fortune that he spotted a restaurant from his boat and told his attorney to buy it. Somewhere in the communication chain, wires got crossed and the attorney began negotiating for Orient by the Sea instead. Rowan showed up, looked around and decided to buy the wrong restaurant anyway. Asked whether that story was really true, Rowan laughed. “It is actually true,” he said.

As for whether more North Fork acquisitions — restaurants or otherwise — might be coming, Rowan said there is no grand plan. He operates Duryea’s in Orient and spent this summer getting to know the area better, but said his interest was specifically in the East Marion land.

“I really don’t have any other plans at this point,” he said.

So, for now, East Marion’s newest 112-acre landowner said he will be tidying up the spectacular half-mile of waterfront and figuring out what, anything, he wants to do there. Which leaves the 16 lots, the $30 million investment and the question of what happens in “a couple of years.” But perhaps there really isn’t a master plan.

As Rowan put it when discussing his accidental restaurant acquisition: “Stuff happens, Laura.”