- Joined
- Feb 28, 2021
It's hard to find anything on his grandparents, he doesn't mention his parents by name.@AssignedEva Is there any info to be had about his grandfather? He's (probably WAS at this point) apparently some big real-estate broker in one of the big cities in the US and that's very likely where the family's initial wealth stems from
I have been able to find her mother is called Sedef Piker, and she's a commercial landlord. The latter isn't a massive revelation because he openly acknowledged it in 2016.

(Archive)
Some other pictures he posted of her (and possibly of his maternal grandparents?)



Running them through PimEye managed to get me this photograph on servas.org (archive)

She's got a twitter @SedefsCorner and her instagram is the same. Although the instagram is locked down, she did have it set up to autotweet and she's posted about celebrating her son Murat's birthday in Los Angeles (Murat is Hasan's brother). Also I did find this of her retweeting Cenk hyping up Hasan, haha.

and she occasionally retweeted stuff about Hasan winning Streamies, aww.
Her parents were still alive as of 2021, moving from New Jersey to the West Coast

(archive) and I'm wondering if maybe her father is the landlord.
Her full name appears to be Ülker Sedef Piker - Hasan's facebook post mentioned she did an art history degree, and also he recently talked about how she wanted to go to Mexico to celebrate finishing her exam; sure enough she's studying at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Architecture School.

(archive)
Genuinely seems like an interesting lady who seems to spend all her time going to museums, teaching art history and studying. I think her and Cenk's mother is Nukhet Uygur, who used to have a New Jersey based home textiles company called Nuko Creations

(archive)
and their father is Dogan Uygur who it transpires Cenk wrote a book about (which now makes my sleuthing feel a bit redundant) -

Sure enough, this book does apparently mention that Dogan is a landlord; it's the tale of how Dogan left behind a life of impoverished subsistence farming to "successes in engineering and real estate". The success in Engineering relates to his company Enternasyonal Makina Sanayi, which was "at the forefront of Turkish machine manufacturing during the 1970s", but he left Turkey in 1978 due to political upheavals to go to America, where he "worked in Commercial Real Estate for 30 years". There's a reference here to Dogan's commercial holdings on this 2009 article from Incisive Media's Daily Business Review (can't archive, paywall) -
His American commercial landlord company was called (rather creatively) Dogan Uygur & Associates. It appears that the company also dabbled in residential holdings -Harbour Centre’s occupancy has dropped to less than 70% now from about 90% when the $51.2-million mortgage was put into the loan pool by Morgan Stanley in early 2006. UBS is the anchor tenant.
The 33 fund investors in the building at 18851 NE 29th Ave. purchased it for about $70 million through NNN Aventura Harbour Centre, the entity created for the deal by then fund sponsor Triple NNN (Net) Realty. Dogan Uygur, a commercial real estate owner in Eatontown, NJ and a member of the Harbour Centre fund, said in an e-mail that he couldn’t comment on what the group intended to do with the building.

This is a house, I think the story this is telling that Dogan Uygur & Associates bought a parcel of land and built a house on it, then sold it on to private owners. What I don't know is how to get more information from this point... I think it's possible there was some residential landlordism but I can't see any evidence of it, nor an idea of the sort of revenues this company generated (or indeed if Hasan's mother has continued with this company or started her own company or what they do). I'd be interested to know if Cenk's book mentions if they've also gone into property development in Turkey.