Stephan Lee

Stephan Lee is the Founder and President of Tossa Group Inc., a New York–based cross-border real estate investment, development, and advisory firm. He has extensive experience advising and executing international real estate strategies across the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

At Tossa Group, Mr. Lee focuses on three core areas: facilitating cross-border investment and partnership formation from Korean and Japanese institutional investors into U.S. real estate, particularly in the context of reshoring and onshoring trends; supporting U.S. sponsors and investors seeking entry and expansion into the Korean and Japanese real estate market; and providing advisory services on U.S. real estate investment, development, and business strategy.

Most recently, Mr. Lee served as Director of Investor Relations at SomeraRoad, where he led cross-border capital raising and strategic partnerships with institutional investors in South Korea and Japan. He established a strategic partnership with a publicly listed Korean conglomerate and secured equity investment for a ground-up development project.

Previously, he was a Director at Mastern Investment Management in New York, where he managed a $3.74 billion U.S. real estate portfolio on behalf of Korean institutional investors. His responsibilities included acquisitions, development, and asset management across multifamily, office, and industrial assets, as well as the launch of a real estate development management platform supporting Asian developers and industrial companies expanding into the U.S. market.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Lee held senior development roles at Twining Properties in New York, overseeing over 1,200 multifamily units and a life sciences office development in collaboration with Yale University and the City of New Haven, and at StoryBuilt in Seattle, where he managed ground-up mixed-use and multifamily projects. He also served at public sector as a Real Estate Transaction Manager at the State of New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), supporting transit-oriented development initiatives through acquisitions, dispositions, and leasing. He began his career as an architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) in New York.

Mr. Lee holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Yonsei University. Trilingual in English, Korean, and Japanese, and having lived and worked in Seoul, Tokyo, and New York, he brings a multidisciplinary perspective spanning architecture, development, investment, and public-sector real estate. As a first-generation immigrant in New York City, he specializes in aligning institutional capital and long-term partnerships between Asian investors and U.S. real estate operators.