A rendering of the building slated for 204 Wythe Avenue (credit: Brownstoner)

The 54,850-square-foot Williamsburg commercial carpet warehouse at 204 Wythe Avenue purchased by Area Property Partners at the end of October is slated to be transformed into a five-story, 157-unit building, according to Bronwstoner. It was not immediately clear whether the property would be a condominium or a rental.

Area purchased the warehouse, between North 4th and 5th streets in Williamsburg, for $27.5 million a few weeks ago and has filed an application with the city for the redevelopment of the site. Architecture firm SLCE will be designing the building, Brownstoner said.
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Real estate developers, brokers and attorneys are gathered for the third annual Massey Knakal Multi-family Summit for the tri-state area at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center on Sixth Avenue. The focus of this year’s summit is the acquisition, disposition, financing and management of multi-family properties in the greater New York City area, with a special emphasis on the political environment, trends in rents and operations, as well as a discussion of cap rates, financing and interest rates.

Bruce Beal, executive vice president of the Related Companies, talked about about the rental market and Related’s current projects.

“We’ve been doing everything from looking at distressed opportunities — projects that failed, retail projects that weren’t leased, half built condominium buildings — mostly in our core markets like New York, Boston, California,” he said. — Katherine Clarke [more]

From left: William Mack, chairman of Area Property Partners, Neil Rubler, CEO of Vantage Properties, 43-09 47th Avenue in Sunnyside and 102-43 Corona Avenue in Corona

Major residential landlord Vantage Properties is turning over most of its ownership position in nearly 80 heavily rent-regulated apartment buildings in Queens to joint venture partner Area Property Partners, sources familiar with the deal said.

Area Property, led by chairman William Mack, will take control of the apartment buildings from Vantage, headed by CEO Neil Rubler, by the end of December, and transfer management to two well-known firms, the sources said. However Vantage would retain some ownership stake, but it was not clear what it would be, another source said.

Manhattan-based Cooper Square Realty and Forest Hills-based Bronstein Properties, will manage the buildings once the change happens, several sources said. [more]

Banks and private equity firms are eagerly throwing their hats in the ring for the approximately $9.5 billion U.S. real estate portfolio on offer from Anglo Irish Bank, the Wall Street Journal reported. The largest single commercial property loan sale since the start of the recession, complete with a number of troubled loans, the portfolio has attracted much attention from investors in distressed property.
By the deadline yesterday, Blackstone Group, Lone Star Funds, LNR Property, TPG Capital, Colony Capital, Area Property Partners, Starwood Capital Group, Five Mile Capital Partners and the CIM Group had all submitted or were intending to sumbit bids for at least some portion of the portfolio, sources said. The portfolio has also attracted the interest of banks, including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, given that there are three portfolios of loans that are performing and expected to mostly stay that way through maturity, the Journal said. [more]

Clockwise from left: Neil Rubler, head of Vantage Properties, William Mack, founder of Area Property Partners, Jordan Slone, CEO of Harbor Group International, 3489 Broadway, 610 West 163rd Street, 548 West 164th Street and 519 West 143rd Street

The global private real estate firm Harbor Group International partnered with Great Neck, L.I.-based Jadam Equities to take control of a four-building, rent-regulated portfolio in Hamilton Heights from owners Vantage Properties and equity partner Area Property Partners.

Harbor Group International, based in Norfolk, Va. and led by Chairman and CEO Jordan Slone, won control after buying the mezzanine loan secured by an ownership interest in the 214-unit portfolio and holding a nonjudicial foreclosure. Vantage, run by President and CEO Neil Rubler, and the William Mack-led Area bought the four-building Esquire Portfolio in 2007 for $31 million.

It was Harbor Group’s first acquisition of a multi-family building in Manhattan, even as it owns about 9.8 million in commercial property and approximately 20,000 apartment units internationally. The company owns an interest in 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan and 1412 Broadway in Midtown. [more]

In a move intended to raise funds for investments abroad, William Mack’s Area Property Partners has sold a 35 percent, non-controlling stake in the company to National Australia Bank, according to Bloomberg News. New York-based Area, which counts the Time Warner Center among its New York investments, is looking to expand its real estate portfolio and plans to spend upwards of $1 billion in equity this year, with $500 million of that going to Europe and India and the rest being invested domestically. [more]

Developer Jeff Hirschfeld of Hirschfeld Properties has filed suit against German-based lender Eurohypo and Area Property Partners, alleging they sabotaged his multi-million dollar upgrade of a South Jersey residential property after his joint-venture partner, a unit of Dubai World, ran into financial trouble.

Hirschfeld teamed up with Dubai Investment Group in 2008 to buy the former Landmark Apartments, a 544-unit complex at 1900 Frontage Road in Cherry Hill, N.J., for $71.3 million.

In the Feb. 25 lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court, Hirschfeld alleges the lenders stopped funding the project after learning of Dubai World’s financial crisis and then foreclosed on the deal. [more]

Blackstone Group is set to buy the U.S. shopping mall assets of Australian landlord Centro Properties Group for $9.4 billion after beating out bids from a Morgan Stanley-Starwood Capital partnership and a joint venture of NRDC Equity Partners and Area Property Partners, the Wall Street Journal reported. The deal, which includes 588 shopping centers, would be Blackstone’s largest since its acquisition of Hilton Worldwide in October 2007 and indicates an optimistic bet on U.S. retail, according to Bloomberg News. Among the properties Blackstone is slated to take over is Yonkers’ Highbridge Plaza, as well as several malls in Westchester and Long Island. [more]

The year was 2008 and the nation was in a serious financial crisis. Very few financial institutions were interested in providing financing for any real estate class. If the subject was financing for a hotel, the lender might have made the following remark: “Do not pass go, do not collect $200 and make certain never to talk to me about financing a hotel.” At the beginning of the year, I wrote an article entitled “Good riddance to 2009 for the U.S. hotel industry.” In it I quoted Mark Lomanno, the president of Smith Travel Research, when he said, “Good riddance to 2009, a year which we believe will go down as the worst in the modern hotel industry. The combination of a distressed economy in conjunction with panic pricing drove [revenue per available room, or revpar,] down to levels that were virtually incomprehensible just a year and a half ago.”

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From left: James Stuckey, dean of the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate and Michael Fascitelli, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust; Panelists from left: Larry Silverstein, Michael Fascitelli, Willliam Mack, Marc Holliday and Bill Rudin

“Sometimes being a REIT felt like being between a dog and a fire hydrant,” Vornado Realty Trust CEO Michael Fascitelli said this afternoon, reflecting on the past couple of years in the industry before a packed ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and pausing for effect.

But no longer.

While public real estate investment trusts suffered significant losses in the immediate aftermath of the real estate crash, they’ve bounced back with impressive vigor, Fascitelli said. Plus, he offered as proof, there were very few bankruptcies.

Speaking on a panel at NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate’s annual conference on capital markets, Fascitelli was joined by Marc Holliday, who said that life is pretty good over at SL Green right now, too. [more]