Source: Eastern Consolidated

Historically low cap rates have finally drawn Manhattan commercial property sellers to the table and ignited the previously anemic market, Eastern Consolidated President Daun Paris said with today’s release of the company’s second-quarter property sales report.

As a similar report by Massey Knakal Realty Services indicated last week, the dollar volume of property sales in the second quarter of 2011 surged, largely on the backs of $100-million-plus transactions. The Eastern Consolidated report shows sales doubled to $9.4 billion compared to the previous quarter. There were 25 such sales in the second quarter as opposed to the 11 recorded in the first quarter, according to the report. However, overall sales activity remained stagnant, as 187 transactions closed in each quarter. – Adam Fusfeld [more]

Peter Hauspurg, chairman and CEO of Eastern Consolidated and Daun Paris, president of Eastern Consolidated
From the June issue: Home may be where the heart is, but what if it’s also in the workplace? This month The Real Deal takes a look at couples who work in the real estate industry.
While such pairings aren’t the norm in the business, there are high-profile examples like “Jvanka” — that is, husband-and-wife Jared Kushner, principal of Kushner Companies, and Ivanka Trump, a vice president at the Trump Organization.
Trump has reportedly said that having a shared background in real estate has been a boon to her relationship with Kushner, as she’s keenly interested in his descriptions of work machinations that others might find dull — a sentiment echoed by everyone TRD spoke to with a partner in the industry.
Aside from having a common passion, what makes couples like Trump and Kushner tick?
Here’s what five of them had to say. [more]

From left: David Noonan, Jennifer Schwartzman, Robert Eisenberg, Barry Gosin, Mark Weiss and Steven Spinola

Newmark Knight Frank brokers David Noonan and Jennifer Schwartzman took home the top prize last night at the Real Estate Board of New York’s Most Ingenious Deal of the Year Awards. The ceremony honored the most creative commercial deals made in the last year, as judged by a panel that includes brokers and property owners, according to REBNY President Steven Spinola.

Taking home second place were Robert Eisenberg, Barry Gosin and Mark Weiss, also from Newmark, while CB Richard Ellis’ Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan nabbed third place. [more]

After his company nabbed two defaulted loans in Williamsburg, Peter Hauspurg, chairman and CEO of Eastern Consolidated, said he thinks the neighborhood might be ripe for distressed asset opportunities. In a recent interview with the Observer, Hauspurg talked about working with his wife, Daun Paris, president of Eastern Consolidated, and not doing his own taxes. He also said Williamsburg “probably has the greatest concentration of troubled real estate projects around.” Williamsburg’s popularity during the boom years likely contributed to its current woes, Hauspurg said, noting that “irrational exuberance” may have been partially to blame. “Everybody went there at the same time,” Hauspurg said. “The banks gave [developers] the money, they put up the structures and there just weren’t enough buyers.”

From left: Peter Riguardi, Don Capoccia, Frederick Peters, Roger Erickson and Daun Paris

Although many end-of-the-year residential and commercial real estate sales reports have yet to arrive, a new year grants the license to look back and evaluate how predictions and prognostications made last year panned out over the past 12 months. Many of the experts The Real Deal talked to last year had a bleak outlook for 2009 — and rightly so. But others missed the mark, either with too-optimistic predictions for recovery or overreaching pessimism that — if it’s possible — actually overstated how devastating the market would ultimately prove to be in 2009. Here, The Real Deal looks back at some of the top claims and predictions made in the beginning of last year to see who hit the nail on the head and who missed the mark.  More

[more]

Daun Paris, president of Eastern Consolidated

From the November issue: Daun Paris is president of Eastern Consolidated, the brokerage company she co-founded in 1981 with partner Peter Hauspurg, whom she married in 1983. Since then, Eastern Consolidated has grown into the largest single-office commercial real estate investment services firm in the United States, with over $4 billion in annual sales. Paris directs day-to-day operations and handles the firm’s strategic direction. Paris talked to The Real Deal about being a woman in a male-dominated field, working with her husband, and life on the farm. [more]