The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

Vornado takes bath on Madison Avenue retail condo sale

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 03:50 PM PDT

Billionaires know how to find a bargain. The price of one of the three retail properties that Ruben Brothers recently acquired from Vornado Realty Trust was just $50 million, less than half of what the real estate investment trust had paid for it, according to property records. The 18,000-square-foot retail condominium at 828-850 Madison Avenue was among Vornado’s five retail property sales announced in late August. At that time, Vornado said it had agreed to

Brokerage execs gush over REBNY, CoStar listing portal. Agents aren’t sold

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 03:02 PM PDT

A long-awaited public portal for the Real Estate Board of New York’s residential listings is officially on its way, with a well-heeled partner bent on ending StreetEasy’s reign as the city’s dominant listings platform. Branded as Citysnap and slated to come online in the second quarter of 2022, the portal will be built through a partnership between REBNY and Homesnap, a residential software company owned by commercial data giant CoStar Group. The Real Deal first

CRE survived Covid with flexibility, focus on convenience: report

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 02:45 PM PDT

Commercial real estate’s resilience through the pandemic hinged on its surprising flexibility and new focus on convenience — themes that will remain vital going forward, a report concludes. The industry held up far better than most professionals expected at the outset of the economic shutdown in March 2020, according to Emerging Trends in Real Estate, a trends and forecast report published annually by PwC and the Urban Land Institute. “By forcing people to work and

Harbor Group grabs $558M in financing for Black Rock purchase

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 02:15 PM PDT

A huge office purchase requires huge financing, and Harbor Group International got it for its recent acquisition of Black Rock. Two months ago HGI entered into an agreement to buy the office building at 51 West 52nd Street from ViacomCBS for $760 million. Now, the Commercial Observer reports that $558 million of that is coming from commercial mortgage-backed securities financing. The six-year, floating-rate capital was provided by Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, which combined on

Luxe condo owners benefit from city’s flawed property-valuation process

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 01:45 PM PDT

Wealthy condo owners benefit from New York City’s flawed property-valuation process, in which officials use arbitrary calculations and shift the majority of tax burdens to lower-priced properties and rentals, according to a new Bloomberg News investigation. Authorities have blamed imbalances in tax bills on Section 581 of the New York Real Property Tax Law, which has been interpreted to mean that assessors determine taxable value based on the hypothetical incomes co-ops and condos would generate.

Shaken, not stirred: LA commercial landlords are opting out of earthquake insurance

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 01:15 PM PDT

Doomsday prophets in Los Angeles are waiting for the Big One. It’s the earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 or above that would strike along the southern San Andreas fault line, pulverizing L.A.’s built environment, flattening homes, offices, shopping centers and likely leading to tens of billions of dollars in property damage — not to mention loss of lives. Such a quake would be 44 times stronger than the one in Northridge in 1994, a

Manhattan retail market ticks up, indicating slow recovery

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 12:30 PM PDT

Manhattan’s retail market is showing slow signs of recovery aided by a few major deals, according to a new report by CBRE. Direct ground-floor availabilities across 16 of Manhattan’s shopping corridors decreased in the third quarter of this year, from 290 to 282 quarter-over-quarter. Though the figure is 11 percent higher than it was a year prior, the slight decrease marked the first decline in availability in the region since 2019. Leasing activity, which includes

Hochul vows to work with mayor, punts on Penn Station details

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 12:00 PM PDT

Less than two months after assuming office, Gov. Kathy Hochul is already doing a few things differently than her predecessor. For one, she isn’t quite as keen on slideshows glorifying New York’s past infrastructure feats, nor name dropping Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller. And while speaking to a crowd of builders, architects and developers on Thursday, she vowed to do something Gov. Andrew Cuomo actively avoided: work alongside New York City’s mayor to get some

City orders Meatpacking office developer to dismantle, rebuild slouching façades

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 11:30 AM PDT

After seven years navigating a maze of approval processes, Tavros thought it could finally start construction on its Meatpacking District office building. Then the walls started caving in. Tavros, whose projects include the Dime Savings Bank redevelopment in Williamsburg, plans to construct a nine-story commercial building on a peculiar assemblage it acquired back in 2014 at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street. The building would be set back on the plot, behind a

Hardball lender Maverick seeks foreclosure sale on historic East Village theater

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 11:00 AM PDT

The historic building that has long housed Theatre 80 St. Marks in Manhattan’s East Village survived the threat of prohibition-era police raids or robbers making off with cash stashed in underground safes. Now, it faces a final curtain call from its lender. Maverick Real Estate Partners, known for its hardball tactics, is using a provision that skirts a statewide moratorium on traditional foreclosures to try to go after the former speakeasy and home of the

Children’s Fund moves to foreclose on Ceruzzi’s UES condo project

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 10:39 AM PDT

Ceruzzi Properties has tried just about everything to save its troubled Hayworth condo project on the Upper East Side, but the developer has run out of rope. The lender on the 61-unit building on Lexington Avenue initiated a foreclosure action for Ceruzzi’s ownership interest in the property, according to a notice for the auction. The move by the UK-based Children’s Investment Fund comes after Ceruzzi — whose founder, Louis Ceruzzi, died unexpectedly in 2017 —

Peebles, Witkoff plan Hudson Yards supertall

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 09:50 AM PDT

The Peebles Corporation, Exact Capital Group and the Witkoff Group submitted an RFP for a 1,500-foot Hudson Yards-area complex. The proposal is for a building on Manhattan’s west side at 418 11th Avenue between West 35th and West 36th Street on a 1.2-acre lot, New York YIMBY reported. David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates is listed as the architect on the project. The bid for the project marks the possibility not only for one of the

First-time fund managers bet $480M on self-storage across US

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 09:19 AM PDT

A pair of first-time real estate fund managers are betting half a billion dollars on the ever-resilient self-storage sector. Concord Wilshire, a Los Angeles-based developer, and Summit Investment Management, a Denver-based distressed debt investor, will put $480 million to work over the next four years buying and developing 40 self-storage facilities. The Miami-based venture, known as Concord Summit Fund-1, launched in April and has already made commitments for properties in Atlanta, Tampa and Boston. “Over

End of moratorium did not result in mass evictions

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 08:15 AM PDT

The mass eviction event feared by many when the federal moratorium ended in August has not come to pass — not yet, at least. Court eviction filings increased by 8.7 percent in the United States from August to September in more than 30 cities tracked by Princeton’s Eviction Lab. While that figure marks an increase, the Wall Street Journal reports the 36,796 filings were only about half of the month’s pre-pandemic average. In the wake

Fintech firm doubles down at ESRT’s One Grand Central

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 06:28 AM PDT

Fintech firm iCapital Network is again doubling its space at Empire State Realty Trust’s One Grand Central Place. The company has agreed to a lease extension in the Midtown Manhattan office building for an additional 35,186 square feet on the 25th floor, increasing its presence over three floors to 64,537 square feet across three floors, according to the Commercial Observer. The extension of the lease at 60 East 42nd Street is for six years, tacked

Two Montauk hotels hit the market asking combined $71M

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 05:30 AM PDT

Two oceanfront hotels in Montauk have hit the market, asking $45.9 million and $25 million. The pricier listing, the Sands Motel at 71 South Emerson Avenue, was built in 1951. A main building has 36 rooms, all with decks facing the ocean or Fort Pond. A separate building has eight suites with decks. There is also a two-bedroom cottage. The Sands’ website says it has been family-owned since 1951 “under the vision of Abe and

Connecticut, Long Island projects show how pandemic has changed real estate

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 05:00 AM PDT

Two tri-state area development projects show how pandemic-driven demand in the housing market is shaping the region’s broader real estate landscape. In Farmington, Connecticut, an affiliate of CSRE Group scored a $32 million construction loan from Kriss Capital to convert a former hotel into an apartment community, according to Real Estate Weekly. The development was the site of the Hartford Marriott Farmington, a 381-key hotel 10 miles southwest of the state capital. The hotel couldn’t

An alleged Miami Ponzi hustle

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 04:30 AM PDT

Like most alleged Ponzi schemes, a Miami-based troika’s plan to tap South American investors to fund their real estate projects started off with non-criminal, ambitious intentions. Ernesto Weisson, a Coconut Grove businessman and architect who spent time as a developer in his native Ecuador, teamed up with fellow Ecuadorian and financial manager Roberto Cortes to build a few luxury homes on Key Biscayne through traditional funding sources and construction loans in the early 2000s, according

Luxury home deals soar in Hamptons, New York, South Florida

Posted: 14 Oct 2021 04:00 AM PDT

This year is chock-full of luxury deals across the Hamptons, New York City and South Florida, according to a new report by Bespoke. The Hamptons has had 87 deals at or above $10 million so far this year, totaling $1.6 billion. New York City counted 173 transactions making up $2.9 billion. Meanwhile in South Florida, there were as many as 279 deals, totaling $5.4 billion. “The big takeaway is that 2021 is outperforming 2020, which