A prime West Chelsea development site could be home to a new hotel, Crain’s reported.

The 12,083-square-foot parcel, which is right now home to a seven-story, mixed-use loft building, also comes with air rights from nearby properties, James Nelson, a partner at Massey Knakal Realty Services, which has been retained exclusively to market the site, told Crain’s.

The buildings at 146-148 West 28th Street and parking lot at 140-144 West 28th Street offer 170,000 feet of buildable space, Crain’s said, and so could make the perfect site for a new hotel, as many other have sprung up in the area of late — such as the Ace Hotel and Hotel Eventi — and New York City seems to be able to absorb an inexhaustible supply of lodging.
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Landlords in the area around Broadway north of the Flatiron building have begun offering rent concessions to independent retailers, the Wall Street Journal reported, and the neighborhood is beginning to shed its wholesale and bootleg retail reputation.

For example, Ace Hotel developers the Sydell Group landed Stumptown Coffee Roasters and clothing store Opening Ceremony by offering “relatively low, fixed rents,” according to CEO Andrew Zobler, who takes a percentage of profits in exchange. “We basically take a long-term interest in the neighborhood as a whole,” he said, noting that wholesalers and bootleggers were willing to pay higher rents for the area than anyone else.
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Dune Real Estate Partners has purchased the loan for a portfolio of 36 apartment houses on the Upper West Side for close to $105.1 million — a 45 percent discount — Crain’s reported. According to numbers provided by real estate analytics firm Trepp, the loan is valued at $192.1 million. The buildings concerned, which house a total of 1,083 units, were bought by controversial landlord the Pinnacle Group with the Praedium Group during the real estate boom. Pinnacle alone was thought to have purchased $1 billion in distressed buildings in Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx between 2004 and 2006, coming under extensive criticism for attempts to hike rents after fudging capital improvements. [more]

From left: Ace Hotel owner Allen Gross and
Chartres Lodging Group partner Bruce Blum

Ace Hotel owner and GFI Capital Resources Group President Allen Gross and Chartres Lodging Group partner Bruce Blum have formed a Manhattan-based private equity hotel investment firm which will “specialize in value enhancement activities through executing redevelopment, repositioning and/or asset management strategies,” in New York City, they announced in a statement today.

“GB Lodging will be a nimble, hotel value enhancement vehicle that will leverage its boutique and branded DNA to capitalize on special situations as this next cycle evolves,” Blum said. “No doubt Allen’s impressive real estate investment and development track record coupled with his extensive capital markets’ relationships will provide an invaluable backbone to our growth.” – Katherine Clarke [more]

From the November issue: Twenty-Ninth Street, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, is a block in transition. Once dominated by knock-off purse dealers and wholesale perfumeries, this diverse stretch is now home to a hip hotel and pricey new boutiques.

It’s also the site of the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque, and the scents of halal now mingle with those of Stumptown Coffee, the Michelin-starred Breslin Bar & Dining Room, and the Pakistani and Indian restaurant Gourmet Palace. A few doors down is the church where Donald Trump married his first wife, Ivana.

The block, residents and brokers predict, is poised for a development explosion. Local landlords say they are now raising rents for tenants, and receiving countless inquiries from developers, restaurateurs, and retailers looking to move onto the block.

“There [are] not that many areas left to develop right around Fifth Avenue,” explained Larry Rich, senior vice president of marketing at the brokerage Core, who often shows apartments in the area. [more]

German bank WestLB AG is marketing a $342 million portfolio of loans backed by hotels and resorts that include the Ace Hotel in Manhattan and a beach resort in Miami, according to the Wall Street Journal. The portfolio might attract bids of 60 to 70 cents on the dollar, experts said. Jones Lang LaSalle is managing the sale.
“The mix of hotels may make it harder to find one buyer who wants the whole portfolio,” said Tom McConnell, senior managing director of global hospitality at Cushman & Wakefield.
WestLB, like a number of European banks, lent aggressively to U.S. developers during the property bubble, but, unlike others, it provided financing even for more speculative resort projects. The bank is owned by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and regional savings banks. [more]

While the Ace Hotel has drawn a trendy clientele since opening in May 2009 at 1186 Broadway on the corner of 29th Street, the remaining few single-room-occupancy tenants living there are none too pleased by the changes that have happened to their home, according to the New York Post. Roughly 30 rent-stabilized tenants currently live in the hotel, some of whom pay just $500 a month for their pads. But residents there, who tried to stop the building’s conversion to a hotel with a lawsuit in 2008, say that hotel developer GFI Development is trying to push them out by ignoring routine maintenance requests and barring them from the hotel’s common areas. [more]

From the March issue: Tourism is back, and lenders are eyeing hotels more favorably as a result. In 2010, a record 48.7 million visitors traveled to New York City. These visitors spent approximately $31 billion during their visits to the Big Apple, according to estimates by NYC & Company, the city’s official marketing and tourism organization. To catch some of those tourist dollars, more than 36 hotels opened in New York last year. In addition, there are at least 26 new hotels in line for construction. Concurrently, financing for the hospitality asset class — which was in the doghouse with lenders just a few years ago, ranking as their least favored sector — has improved for both hotel owners and developers. [more]

Tenants were evacuated today from 1182 Broadway at 29th Street, a former manufacturing building that had been illegally transformed into a residential rental space, according to Curbed. The building lacked several basic safety features, the Department of Buildings said, including fire sprinklers, secondary exits and adequate stairwells to avoid entrapment. The building owner, Mocal Enterprises, was handed violations for the improper conversion and for allowing tenants to move in despite the building’s lack of necessary permits. The units, which had rents ranging from $2,900 to $6,000, were marketed as “live-work space[s],” that would cause “your artistic juices… to flow.” Mocal, for its part, said it’s currently working with DOB to “resolve this unfortunate situation.”

Danny Meyer debuted Maialino at the Gramercy Hotel in November.

From the January issue: Hotel developers are planning to boost business at their Manhattan
restaurants this year with one special ingredient: the glamour of
brand-name chefs. Celebrity chef and hotel pairings have been popular in New York
since the late ’90s, but in the weak economy, the trend is
accelerating.
This month, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant Mark
Jean-Georges is set to open in the Mark Hotel. That follows Danny
Meyer’s November debut of Maialino at the Gramercy Hotel, and a report
last month confirming rumors that Todd English will run the food court
at the Plaza. Also late last year, foodies salivated over acclaimed chef April
Bloomfield’s opening of the Breslin at the Ace Hotel on 29th Street. In
addition, the East Side Social Club in the Pod Hotel has been
attracting high-profile guests. more