The upper floors of Tel Aviv’s financial axis, set aside for those who live where they work.
Rothschild Axis
The First International Bank Tower — known locally and throughout this text simply as FIBI — is, at ground and office levels, one of the principal commercial addresses of Israel’s financial district. Above a certain floor, the building becomes something else entirely. A small number of residential levels, held separately from the offices below, with a dedicated lift bank, a dedicated lobby, and views that no purely residential building on Rothschild can match.
This mixed-use configuration — standard in Manhattan, Hong Kong, and the financial quarters of London and Singapore — remains unusual in Tel Aviv. For the right buyer, it is precisely the right answer.
On the axis
The building sits within walking distance of nearly every institution that matters to its residents’ professional lives.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is a short walk away. The headquarters of the country’s principal banks are closer still. The major law firms, investment houses, and family offices that service the financial sector are clustered within the same few blocks. For a resident whose working life is conducted in this corridor, the journey home is measured in minutes by foot or, in some cases, in the vertical seconds of a lift ride from the office floor to the apartment above.
The weekday atmosphere is corporate, as it must be. Weekend and evening activity is fully residential, with the surrounding cafes and restaurants serving the owners who have chosen to live where they work.
On the buyer
The FIBI resident is usually, though not always, someone whose professional life makes the decision obvious.
Senior figures in finance, law, and investment management are disproportionately represented. A number of owners have purchased the apartment explicitly to shorten the commute — the commute, in this case, being the distance between the office floor and the residential floor of the same tower. For a senior partner who keeps unpredictable hours and values the ability to walk home in any weather without arranging transport, the building is effectively without substitute.
The apartments are also commonly acquired by buyers for whom the view is the decisive factor. The residential floors begin well above the fortieth level, and the panorama spans the entire Tel Aviv basin — the Mediterranean to the west, the Judean Hills to the east, the full length of the Ayalon to the north and south. Few addresses in the country offer an equivalent sight line, and fewer still do so without the obstruction of later construction eventually closing it off.
On representation
The residential component of FIBI transacts quietly, and through a small number of channels.
The mixed-use nature of the building means that the residences are not represented by the general Rothschild brokerage community in the way a purely residential address would be. The owners are usually known to the building’s management and to the handful of offices that have worked with FIBI over time. Residences appear when they appear, and the list of people who hear about them first is quite short.
We have handled introductions at FIBI on several occasions — generally to finance professionals whose working lives had already brought them into the building, and who recognised, at some point in that time, that living there might make more sense than travelling to it.
The view that begins above the fortieth floor. And the residents for whom the commute is measured in lift seconds.
A note from the office. If you are considering a residence at FIBI — as a buyer, as an owner, or simply as a matter under quiet consideration — a brief conversation is the simplest place to begin.
→ Request a conversation
By appointment. By introduction. By conversation.
