The Artisan Lofts (credit: PropertyShark)

The developers of the Artisan Lofts condominium in Tribeca are facing a $6 million lawsuit from Fillmore Real Estate after they missed a deadline to complete construction and failed to make payments to their construction workers.

In a suit filed in New York state Supreme Court, Fillmore alleges that Tribeca Associates partners Elliott Ingerman and William Brodsky breached a contract by failing to obtain a permanent certificate of occupancy at the building, located at 157 Chambers Street, and failing to make payments to Pavarini McGovern, the general contractor at the property. [more]

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has charged a Queens residential real estate firm and one of its brokers with violating the Fair Housing Act by placing an advertisement on Craigslist that discriminated against families with children, according to HUD.

According to the allegations, Roberto Tristaino, then agent with Metro Net Realty in Old Howard Beach, placed the ads for a two-bedroom rental apartment in Bergen Beach on Craigslist in September and October 2008 with the note “mature couple or single without children” in the description.

Such descriptions violate the Fair Housing Act, which forbids any “preference, limitation or discrimination” based on familial status,” HUD indicated in the release. [more]

MeadowWood at Gateway and Fillmore Real Estate’s Jean-Paul Ho

The MeadowWood at Gateway, a 19-building condominium complex in East New York, announced it now has 581 of its 1,152 units sold or in contract. The complex at 12205 Flatlands Avenue, about a half-mile from the Gateway Shopping Center, was originally constructed in the 1960s, before being converted to condos in 1991. According to Streeteasy.com, Taconic Investment Partners purchased the 983 unsold units in 1998 and has since served as the development’s lead sponsor. Taconic invested more than $40 million in renovating the buildings and the community’s outdoor space. TRD [more]

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From the May issue: The land grab is on in Brooklyn. With prices and sales activity rebounding, the borough’s major real estate firms are competing for market share as smaller mom-and-pop firms disappear.
The borough’s three largest firms — Fillmore Real Estate, the Corcoran Group, and Prudential Douglas Elliman — have all added more Brooklyn agents in the past year.
The 45-year-old, family-run Fillmore jumped to 350 agents on The Real Deal’s ranking of biggest firms in the borough this year, taking the top spot. That was up from 288 last year, and last month the firm had some $130.8 million worth of active residential sales listings. [more]

Fillmore’s Jean-Paul Ho and the Avenue K Condominium in Canarsie, Brooklyn

In a sea of one- and two-fa [more]

From the April issue: Christopher Burdzy had walked his clients through almost all of a bank-owned single-family home in Staten Island when they decided to peek inside the basement garage. “This is a bad house! Do not buy it!” read black spray paint on the walls. “That was kind of spooky,” recalled Burdzy, a broker with Staten Island-based Leader Properties, though he wasn’t shocked. Borrowers facing foreclosure will often go to great lengths to prevent new buyers from snatching up their homes, in the hopes that they can buy them back once they hit the market at a discounted price, he said, and he suspects that’s what happened there. [more]

From left: Salvatore Crifasi, founder and principal of Crifasi Real Estate, Susan Meliti, manager of Exit Realty Van Zandt, John Reinhardt, president of Brooklyn-based Fillmore Real Estate

Doors swung open across the country this weekend in honor of a coordinated open house event designed to raise awareness about the soon-to-be expiring homebuyer’s tax credit.
But in New York City, it was pretty much business as usual, brokers said, because the event, which was organized through a national trade group, was poorly timed.
In the city, about six weeks typically elapses between when a person checks out a home and signs a contract to buy it, brokers said, unlike in other national markets, where deals happen faster.
And with contracts having to be signed by April 30 to qualify for the credit, staging an event April 10, they said, does not offer enough time to lock in a sale.
“I thought it came way too late in the season,” says John Reinhardt, president of Brooklyn-based Fillmore Real Estate, of the concept, which originated with the Colorado division of the National Association of Realtors, the trade group to which most outer-borough brokers belong.

Instead, Reinhardt created a localized version: On March 20 and 21, 140 Fillmore listings were opened to the public, or about 75 percent more than on a typical weekend, which resulted in 40 percent more visitors. But the firm also enticed buyers by cutting prices at all the properties, with discounts of between $8,000 to $250,000, for co-ops, single-families and multi-family homes. [more]

From the February issue: Major residential brokerages may still snub their noses at the listings, but a growing number of firms, particularly in the outer boroughs, are fighting for a share of the foreclosed homes market. Lenders took back thousands of homes in New York State last year and thousands more face foreclosure this year. Take Staten Island-based Wonica Realtors and Appraisers. Last year, according to founder and president George Wonica, the firm’s REO division, which specializes in marketing and selling foreclosed residential properties in Staten Island and Brooklyn, accounted for almost 80 percent of his firm’s revenue. “It carried the office,” Wonica told The Real Deal. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The marketplace for REOs — or “Real Estate Owned” by the bank because they did not successfully sell at a foreclosure auction — is thriving in places hit hard by the housing downturn. In New York City that usually means in the outer boroughs, although Manhattan is not impervious.  [more] [more]

Sam Heskel, founder of HMS Associates, who predicts a rise in foreclosures on high-end apartments

From the December issue: While green shoots may have sprouted in some sectors of the New York City residential market, there are plenty of other areas where that is far from the case. Foreclosures continue to ravage neighborhoods throughout the outer boroughs — most notably southern Queens and parts of Brooklyn — and more distress is quietly creeping into the Manhattan residential market. In this month’s Q & A, appraisers, analysts and brokers who follow foreclosures told The Real Deal that while certain areas of the city are starting to level off when it comes to foreclosures, in others it’s difficult to even find a “regular” nondistressed sale. One expert from New York University’s Furman Center said that the third quarter of 2009 saw 6,000 foreclosure filings in the city — the largest number since the research center started tracking quarterly data in the early 1990s. And worrisome trends are on the horizon.

Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon and Tina Fey have all filmed movies in brokerages this summer.

Hollywood has taken an interest in New York City real estate lately,
with several actors filming scenes in real estate offices. Al Pacino
and Susan Sarandon are filming an HBO biopic called “You Don’t Know
Jack” in Fillmore Real Estate’s offices in Brooklyn this week. Earlier
in the summer, Tina Fey shot a scene for “Date Night,” an upcoming
film, in Halstead Property’s office in Soho. Fey plays a real estate
broker in the film. [more]