The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

Never say never: Brookfield, Forest City restart acquisition talks

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 03:20 PM PDT

Brookfield Asset Management’s acquisition of Forest City Realty Trust could happen after all. The real estate investment trust is talking to Brookfield about a sale for $25 to $25.50 per share, Bloomberg reported. A mere three months ago, Forest City rejected a takeover offer of $25 per share from Brookfield and declared it would remain an independent company. “The board concluded that stockholder value would be better enhanced on a standalone basis and that the […]

AvalonBay looking to sell stake in $1.2B Manhattan apartment portfolio

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 03:07 PM PDT

Mega-landlord AvalonBay Communities is hoping to offload half of a $1.2 billion Manhattan portfolio, as apartment prices continue to rise in the city. The publicly-traded firm, one of the largest apartment owners in the U.S., is looking to sell seven buildings in areas including Morningside Heights and Chelsea, sources told Bloomberg. The company did not respond to a request for comment before deadline. The move comes amid rising apartment prices in the city. In February, […]

Appellate court overturns ruling favoring tenant at Solow’s 10 West 57th Street

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 02:51 PM PDT

Sheldon Solow wants to build a 54-story hotel and condominium on West 57th Street, but can’t do it until the last retail tenant on the south side of the block gets out of his way. That tenant, Metropolitan Fine Arts & Antiques, has not been wont to do so and enlisted attorney David Rozenholc — known for securing large buyouts for holdout tenants — to help them fight Solow. The billionaire moved to evict the […]

Fired carpenters’ union employees claim leadership hid sexual harassment allegations against president for months

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 02:32 PM PDT

Two fired employees of the New York City District Council of Carpenters claim leaders of the union kept sexual harassment allegations against its president secret for several months. The letter — filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday — claims the union’s leaders knew that a female employee had accused Steve McInnis of sexual harassment months before notifying the union’s members. McInnis resigned in February amid unspecified allegations of misconduct, though the New York […]

Co-working has been slow to take off in the Hamptons — but some companies are testing the tepid waters

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 01:45 PM PDT

Danielle Candela credits her time at Southampton co-working venture The Spur with “changing her life.” For starters, she won $25,000 to fund her start-up company at “RipTide: Hamptons Sink or Swim,” an East End version of “Shark Tank” held at The Spur. She also met experienced entrepreneurs who became mentors. “I’m around so many amazing people I wouldn’t have had access to before,” said Candela, who was born and raised in the Hamptons. She now […]

Madison puts Clinton Hill warehouse on the market

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 01:20 PM PDT

Madison Realty Capital has opted to try selling its Clinton Hill warehouse at 29 Ryerson Street. The company originally planned to convert the building into creative office space but has instead hired a Cushman & Wakefield team to market the property, according to Crain’s. The vacant building near the Brooklyn Navy Yard spans more than 200,000 square feet. A Cushman team led by Adam Spies, Adam Doneger and Josh King are marketing the property with […]

Here’s what the $10M-$20M NYC investment sales market looked like last week

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 12:50 PM PDT

1.) Aaron Jungreis’ Rosewood Realty Group bought a rental building in the Gravesend area of Brooklyn for $15.7 million. The deal is a rare acquisition for the multifamily brokerage. The property, at 2470 West 1st Street, is a six-story elevator building with 72 apartment units. The seller is Birchwood Management, which gained ownership of the building in 2000. 2.) Catholic group the Sisters of the Order of St. Dominick sold a school building and a residence […]

Eric Adams wants to shrink 80 Flatbush

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 12:20 PM PDT

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams wants to shrink Alloy Development’s Downtown Brooklyn project 80 Flatbush by more than 300 feet. Adams released an advisory decision on the project on Friday, in which he advocated reducing its height from 986 feet to 600 feet, according to Crain’s. He acknowledged that it made sense to add density in projects close to mass transit—the project is located right by Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center—but said he also does not want […]

Digital subscriptions are coming to TheRealDeal.com

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 11:50 AM PDT

Dear Readers, Great journalism often requires years of source building and painstaking research. For informed people, verified reporting and data delivered at lightning speeds are the most important commodities out there — now, more than ever before. As a reader of The Real Deal, you know that better than anyone else. For the past 15 years — beginning in New York and expanding to Miami, L.A. and recently Chicago — we have published the independent, […]

LaSalle chooses Blackstone’s $4.8B bid

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 11:12 AM PDT

LaSalle Hotel Properties reiterated its rejection of Pebblebrook Hotel Trust, choosing instead to move forward with a possible acquisition by the Blackstone Group. In a regulatory filing, LaSalle disclosed that the Blackstone deal values the company at $4.8 billion. The agreement, which both sides signed last May, is an all-cash transaction that sets the stock price at $33.50. Bloomberg first reported LaSalle’s decision. LaSalle continued to refuse Pebblebrook’s advances, saying that the Maryland-based firm’s revised […]

Long Island Cheat Sheet: Suffolk’s May home prices were up 10% year-over-year … & more

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 10:30 AM PDT

May’s Suffolk home prices were 10 percent higher than the year before — the biggest increase in a decade Home prices across Long Island rose over the past year, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island. Suffolk prices rose 10 percent — the county’s greatest year-over-year spike since 2005 — to a median price of $370,000. In Nassau, homes sold for an average $519,000, up 8.1 percent from the previous May, Newsday reported. Agents […]

REITs fall out of favor as interest rates rise

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 10:09 AM PDT

As interest rates rise, investors are questioning whether they’d be better off parking their money in bonds than real estate investment trusts. Last week, the Federal Reserve announced that it would raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point. Following this news, S&P 500 real estate stocks fell 1.2 percent last week and are down 4.3 percent for the year — the worst performance of any S&P sector, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Fed […]

Red Apple lands $130M construction loan for Coney Island resi project

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 08:47 AM PDT

John Catsimatidis’ Red Apple Group landed a construction loan for its under-development residential project in Coney Island, records filed with the city Monday show. Bank of America lent the developer $130 million for the 425-unit project at 3514 Surf Avenue, according to records that hit the city’s Department of Finance. Reached for comment, Catsimatidis told The Real Deal that construction on one of the three buildings at the site has already reached the seventh of […]

Peter Fine’s Jerome Avenue project to include 255 resi units

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 08:10 AM PDT

Developer Peter Fine’s Jerome Avenue project will stand 15 stories tall and include 255 residential units, according to plans filed with the Department of Buildings on Monday. Fine purchased the 25,000-square-foot lot at 1331 Jerome Avenue for $11.1 million in May. It was the first property to be sold in the area since the City Council voted in favor of a rezoning. The building will span about 186,000 square feet overall, split between about 98,000 […]

Here are the week’s top luxury sales

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 07:30 AM PDT

Each week, The Real Deal and CityRealty look back at Manhattan’s priciest apartment sales.

Brooklyn luxury market saw 17 signed contracts last week

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 07:00 AM PDT

Brooklyn’s luxury real estate market saw 17 contracts signed last week, split between three condominiums and 14 houses. The combined asking price of the homes totaled $54.9 million overall and went for an average of roughly $3.2 million, according to the latest report from Stribling & Associates, which counts all homes priced at $2 million or more. The properties spent an average of 143 days on the market. This was a slower week than the […]

Related turns to Uncle Sam for $1B Hudson Yards loan

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 06:42 AM PDT

The Related Companies is seeking a $1 billion, low-interest loan for the next phase of Hudson Yards from the same pool of money that the Gateway project has struggled to tap into. Related filed a draft worksheet with the U.S. Department of Transportation outlining its proposal to use the funds to build a platform over the West Side rail yards, Politco reported. The low-cost loan would save millions compared to traditional financing for Related, which […]

Queens group raises red flags over Heskel Group CEO’s donations to elected officials

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 06:11 AM PDT

A community group opposed to Yeheskel Elias’ planned Jackson Heights development is crying foul over donations the developer made to public officials who have the power to approve the project’s rezoning. Elias, CEO of the Forest Hills-based Heskel Group, teamed up with Sun Equity Partners to pay $27 million in 2016 to buy the site of the former Jackson Heights Cinema at 40-31 82nd Street. The developer applied to rezone the site in September 2017, […]

Manhattan luxury market saw 24 contracts at $4M and up last week: Olshan

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 05:46 AM PDT

Manhattan’s luxury residential market notched 24 contracts last week at $4 million and above, according to Olshan Realty’s weekly luxury market report. A duplex condominium at the Plaza Hotel took the week’s No. 1 spot with an asking price of $33.95 million. That’s a discount of $1 million off the original asking price when the three-bedroom, three-bath unit hit the market in September. The contract price for the 3,947-square-foot condo works out to roughly $8,600 […]

Climate change already hitting home prices

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 05:00 AM PDT

The risk of climate change appears to be having an impact on housing prices. Average home prices in areas that face low risks of flooding, hurricanes and wildfires outpaced areas that had a greater risk of climate change between 2007 and 2017, according to figures from Attom Data Solutions reported by Bloomberg. Average home prices in areas at high risk were worth less last year than they were a decade earlier, Attom’s figures show. Daren […]

The Closing: Dean Dakolias

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 04:30 AM PDT

Constantine (“Dean”) Dakolias is co-chief investment officer of the credit funds group at Fortress Investment Group, the Midtown-based investment manager that SoftBank acquired for $3.3 billion last December. That all-cash deal took the 20-year-old firm private after a volatile decade on the stock market. Fortress has $43.6 billion of assets under management, and Dakolias and his team have done more than $100 billion in transactions across various industries since the credit business launched in 2002. […]

These were the 10 biggest Manhattan loans in May

Posted: 18 Jun 2018 04:00 AM PDT

The largest real estate loans in Manhattan last month saw the money move from the Far West Side back to the center of the island. Midtown dominated the market for property debt in May, with the month’s largest loans backing the neighborhood’s office towers. In total, the 10 largest Manhattan loans equaled $3.4 billion, down from April’s $4.2 billion. See the full list below: 1) Times Square 2.0 – $1.4 billion Maefield Development has bet […]