Alexander Ali

Alexander Ali is the founder and chief executive of The SOCIETY Group, a public relations and brand strategy firm working in luxury residential real estate. He has built a global network connecting the markets of New York, Los Angeles, London, Miami, and Abu Dhabi, with clients ranging from developers and brokerages to the individual agents operating at the top of the market.

He got here sideways. In 2012 he was running The SOCIETY Group as a celebrity publicity firm and living in a building whose owner moved to clear out every tenant over a certificate of occupancy problem. He ran it the way he knew how, as a press campaign, and sixty tenants won a settlement and relocation. It is still the work he is proudest of. The firm turned toward real estate from there.

The SOCIETY Group represented The Agency and Hilton & Hyland on the Playboy Mansion, which sold for $100 million, and went on to represent Los Angeles through its spec mansion boom. Forbes profiled him for the blend: an entertainment publicist applying the machinery of a film launch to a house. The properties since have tended to be the ones people already have opinions about: The One in Bel Air, Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, Olson Kundig's 8899 Beverly.

Somewhere in that stretch he started representing brokers rather than only their listings. He was the first in Los Angeles to take individual agents on privately and build them into names that traveled internationally, and the practice moved east to New York and Miami from there. The work convinced him the industry had no adequate way of recognizing its own, and in 2020 he created the Hollywood Reporter Power Broker Awards, now in their sixth year, which The New Yorker called "the Oscars of real estate."

By 2023 he had identified a second gap. Developers were trying to market new construction to a global buyer while it was still going up, with no forum built for that. UPFRONTS, borrowed in structure from the television network upfronts, is an invitation-only summit sponsored by The Wall Street Journal where international developers present directly to power brokers and buyers in closed rooms. It has since run in New York, Los Angeles, London, Miami, and Dubai.

His work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Real Deal, Business Insider, NPR, CNBC, and Forbes.

He holds a California real estate license and splits his time between New York and Los Angeles.