Citigroup has sold the servicing rights for a $2.6 billion real estate portfolio, including about 2,200 multi-family loans, to CWCapital, Bloomberg News reported, as the bank’s CEO Vikram Pandit continues offloading troubled assets. Citigroup declined to comment on what CWCapital paid for the portfolio.

“Citi’s decision to sell the portfolio is consistent with its strategy of reducing assets in Citi Holdings, CitiGroup’s portfolio of non-core operating businesses and assets,” said a spokesperson for Citigroup.

The portfolio includes about 2,200 multi-family loans from Fannie Mae with an average unpaid principal balance of $1.2 million, CWCapital said today in a statement. [more]

There’s an antique collection of storage trunks — and potentially a community of insects and vermin — in the bowels of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. But in its latest issue, the New Yorker reported that property manager Rose Associates has begun sending letters to tenants asking them to claim their belongings, as CWCapital, which took control of the property after Tishman Speyer defaulted, tries to make better use of the space in advance of a sale.

The 110-building complex has offered tenants trunk storage space since the 1940s. [more]

From left: 100 South 4th Street (credit: PropertyShark) and 120 South 4th Street

Two under-the-radar Brooklyn real estate developers are confronting more than
$51 million in personal guaranty and foreclosure lawsuits on five separate loans
doled out in Williamsburg and Greenpoint in 2006 and 2007.

In the largest and most recent legal action, special servicer CWCapital Asset
Management sued the developers, Menachem Stark and Israel Perlmutter, to
recover $29 million lent in 2007 and secured by the seven-story, 74-unit rental
building at 100 South 4th Street, between Berry Street and Bedford Avenue.

In the CWCapital suit filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn June 28, the special
servicer claims the pair personally owes the full $29 million because of a Chapter
11 filing the pair entered in an effort to block a foreclosure proceeding in 2009. [more]

CW Financial Services, best known in the city as the parent company of CWCapital Asset Management, will acquire Manhattan-based boutique investment bank Rockwood Real Estate Advisors, sources told Crain’s. Formerly known as DTZ Rockwood, the firm provides real estate advisory services, portfolio brokerage and debt and equity, according to its website. As The Real Deal previously reported, Rockwood filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, two years after advising Mann Realty Associates on its $426 million purchase of the Apthorp. Over the last three years the firm has been involved in about $20 billion worth of real estate assets. Crain’s said the move helps CW expand its reach while providing the cash needed to help Rockwood become more competitive. The deal is not final and the terms remain undisclosed. [more]

Stuyvesant Town

From the March issue: Tishman Speyer Properties may have suffered one of the biggest debacles of the downturn with Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village, but the firm appears to be getting its footing back. Over the past year, the 33-year-old Manhattan-based company has gone on a spree of buying, selling, developing and leasing buildings, as well as restructuring some of its debt. Last year, the firm bought around $1.06 billion of property around the world, up from $99 million in 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t just a purchaser, though: The firm sold about $1.9 billion worth of property in 2010, up from $500 million a year earlier. [more]

The attorney to a group of tenants at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village has withdrawn a motion to block the complex’s landlords from raising rents on lease renewals beyond the 2.25 percent and 4.5 percent agreements outlined by the Rent Guidelines Board, following a court order soliciting an outside agency to advise on the legal rent-setting formula for the 110-building residential complex.

The State Division of Housing and Community Renewal, the agency that administers the Rent Stabilization Law, is set to “give the judge an advisory opinion on the proper legal formula by April 1,” according to Alexander Schmidt, a partner with Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, the firm representing Stuy Town’s tenants in Roberts v. Tishman Speyer Properties. TRD [more]

Stuyvesant Town and Robert Scaglion, a senior managing director with property manager Rose Associates

Rents on nearly 600 vacant units at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village are set to climb an average of $2,100 or more in the coming months, according to property manager Rose Associates, following the completion of an average renovation of $84,210 to each unit.

The project, set to cost roughly $48 million, according to special servicer CWCapital, which took control of the property early last year, includes the renovation of the 570 apartments in a similarly modern style to former owner Tishman Speyer, which renovated many of the units when it bought the 110-building complex for $5.4 billion in 2006, according to Robert Scaglion, a senior managing director with Rose Associates.

Scaglion said that despite the increases, which would bring rents roughly up to the market value of similar apartments, the units will remain rent-stabilized. Many of the units have rents of $900 a month, he noted, which would mean those rents would go up to roughly $3,000 a month. [more]

Delinquency uptick driven by Pinnacle-Praedium default on Upper West Side

The volume of seriously impaired CMBS loans in New York City grew by 3.8 percent last month after a portfolio of 1,083 Upper West Side apartments co-owned by Pinnacle Group and private equity partner the Praedium Group slipped further into delinquency, according to October data from Trepp compiled for The Real Deal. The data includes CMBS loans backed by New York City properties whose payments are more than 60 days overdue. The Pinnacle-Praedium delinquency — the fourth-largest of 49 such loans in the city — was solely responsible for the increase, which put the city’s total volume of loans more than 60 days delinquent at $4.9 billion (see the full list of seriously delinquent New York City CMBS loans after the jump).

[more]

Bill Ackman and Stuyvesant Town

The planned foreclosure auction for the Stuyvestant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex has been postponed for a third time, according to Reuters. The delay, intended to help extend negotiations between the lenders and the borrowers, has pushed the auction date to Oct. 29. Special servicer CWCapital Asset Management is expected to take control of the property when the auction, which was previously slated for Oct. 4 and then Oct. 22, does occur. A group of junior lenders at the property, led by Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management, has been angling for control of the housing complex throughout the foreclosure process. CWCapital is said to still be in talks with Ackman and other junior lenders. [Reuters]

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The Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village foreclosure auction, — already rescheduled, and then rescheduled again, for tomorrow — could be postponed for a third time, according to the Post. A source in on the buyout negotiations between special servicer CWCapital, which represents the senior mortgage holders on the 80-acre complex, and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management, which is leading the junior lenders, told the paper that the talks are going so slowly that CW is unlikely to meet its own deadline. Last week, when the auction was delayed for the second time, an attorney for CW told The Real Deal that the company just “wanted a few more days” but was still “committed to the detailed planning required to assure the most favorable resolution and smooth transition of this highly complex property.” It’s unclear how long the possible third delay might last. [Post]

[more]