Most of the world knows the fulsome, pompadour-bearing developer Donald Trump as the king of New York property. But the city's No1 man nowadays might just be an unassuming, 45-year-old immigrant from Taipei.
In just over 10 years, 'Sam' Chang Shan-leong has built his company, the McSam Hotel Group, from an obscure start-up with a US$500,000 plot of land into a juggernaut with more than US$2.3 billion worth of property in development and under construction.
'Nobody has more sites and has gone after underdeveloped areas as aggressively,' says John Fox, senior vice-president of PKF Consulting, an international hotel advisory firm in New York City.
It is a classic immigrant story: a young man fresh from Asia gazes at New York City for the first time at the age of 19. It's love at first sight. He has big dreams and vows to return. Fifteen years later, he scrapes together enough cash to make that initial foray and buy a small unwanted piece of land. The old money looks on with suspicion, but he succeeds. A few years later, he's a millionaire.
Today, at a time when New York City's hotel industry is raking in record profits and most hotels are operating at or near capacity, Mr Chang is positioned to cash in. He is planning to build an estimated 3,000 of the 5,000 hotel rooms in the pipeline. Those numbers - along with the 35 or so hotels he has already built - make Mr Chang's group possibly the largest hotel-development concern in the nation.
In recent years, Mr Chang has expanded out of state, opening hotels in California, Arizona and Connecticut, among other states. Now he's got his eyes set on the biggest prize of all: Asia.