Candia Fisher
Real estate billionaire Candia Fisher was defrauded out of more than half a million dollars, the New York Post reported.

Candia Fisher, 64, sister to Richard Fisher, who is the father of Winston Fisher, partner at real estate company Fisher Brothers, is an avid email user. When a hacker gained access to her personal email account, he or she was easily able to pose as Fisher and convince a personal secretary of hers to wire $548,725 to banks in Australia. When another secretary of Fisher’s saw the large sums being transferred overseas and alerted the heiress, she said she knew nothing about them, the Post said. [more]

[Updated at 2:30 p.m.] When Boston-based real estate investment firm the Rockpoint Group announced that it had sold its stake of Park Avenue Plaza at 55 East 42nd Street earlier this month, the company declined to reveal how much it had received for the sale — but in New York City, secrets don’t stay secret for long.

According to public records filed with the city yesterday, Rockpoint received a massive $569.1 million for its 49 percent share of the 1.2 million-square-foot plaza plus another building at 49 East 52nd Street. The company was represented by CBRE, according to data from Real Capital Analytics. The buyer, Soho China, provided a residential address at 1185 Park Avenue, the same building where JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon resides.

Tenants at Park Avenue Plaza currently include BlackRock, McKinsey & Co. and Swiss Re., it was previously reported. Rockpoint bought into the building last year for around $330 million or $570 per square foot. — Katherine Clarke [more]

Andrew Joblon and Amanda Seyfried and the Trump National Golf Club

A Fisher Brothers executive made the New York Daily News gossip pages today, for being romantically linked to “Mean Girls” actress Amanda Seyfried. Apparently, she and Andrew Joblon, vice president of the acquisition and development group, have been dating for the last month and were seen together at the Eric Trump Foundation’s Invitational & Gala at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester Tuesday. [more]

From left: Yair Levy, Rector Square (source: PropertyShark) and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

A state Supreme Court judge has ordered developer Yair Levy to pay $7.4 million in restitution to the Rector Square condominium and permanently banned him from selling real estate in New York state.

Judge Joan Lobis found last month that Levy defrauded the Battery Park City condo conversion, spending millions of dollars in reserve fund money on illegal personal and general business expenses, including charge card accounts, mobile phone bills and writing checks to family members.

The judgment permanently bans Levy from selling condos or co-op projects in New York state, virtually ending a career lasting more than 30 years in the U.S. [more]

From left: Winston Fisher, a partner with Fisher Brothers, Park Columbus and Doug Harmon of Eastdil Secured

A joint venture between Fisher Brothers, BlackRock and a California pension fund won the 95-unit Upper West Side apartment building Park Columbus with a bid of $48 million in a bankruptcy auction this morning.

In March, embattled developer Yair Levy lost the building located at 101 West 87th Street that he had tried to convert to condominiums, in foreclosure to Garrison Residential Funding. The mortgage and other debts totaling $52.6 million will be wiped out once the closing occurs, court records show.
Fisher Brothers, a major Midtown-based commercial and residential property owner, partnered with investment firm BlackRock and California State Teachers Retirement System, to place the minimum bid in November. Winston Fisher, a partner with Fisher Brothers, declined to comment. [more]

Chart clarification: While CBRE data puts Durst’s portfolio at 7.2 million square feet, a Durst spokesperson later said that figure is actually 9 million.

Asking rents plunged for some of Midtown’s top landlords last year as they competed for the few tenants searching for space in a weak leasing market, but their reductions helped keep their vacancy rates below the market average, experts said. The family-owned Durst Organization dropped its asking rents to $60.82 per square foot in November 2009 from $113.15 per square foot in August 2008, near the pricing peak of the leasing market, according to the most recent data available on Midtown’s top 10 landlords from commercial services firm CB Richard Ellis. The Real Deal compared data from August 2008 to November 2009 for the top 10 landlords in Midtown ranked by square feet owned. The 46 percent decline was the steepest among Midtown’s top 10 landlords, who control 93 million square feet, or about 41 percent of the market. Landlord and tenant leasing broker Cynthia Wasserberger, a managing director at commercial firm Jones Lang LaSalle said the landlords cut prices to attract tenants and keep their buildings filled. “I think all the landlords got aggressive. They were pretty swift in their decision to respond to the market,” Wasserberger said. [more]

While several of the city’s top brokers said the leasing market is approaching a floor for the current down cycle, potential office building buyers are preparing for years of further rent declines, real estate experts said at a forum this morning. “This is a unique city. It is at the bottom or close to [it],” Bruce Mosler, president and CEO of Cushman & Wakefield, said of office leasing in Manhattan. He was on a panel organized by business publisher Bisnow at Cooper Union. But just half an hour earlier at the same event, Michael Fascitelli, president and CEO of landlord Vornado Realty Trust, said potential buyers of office buildings were not predicting rents to increase for several years. He said that expected annual rent increases during the boom years, which were as high as 15 percent, are now at zero. And they could remain at zero for years. He added that to buy a building, a purchaser has to forecast a rent increase at some future time. [more]

On the heels of UBS’ $1.3 billion loss in the second quarter of 2009, its
third consecutive quarterly loss, the Swiss bank last week subletted
28,000 square feet of office space at 299 Park Avenue to a firm called
MarketAxess. The new 8.5-year lease at the Fisher Brothers-owned
building comes less than two weeks after law firm Orrick Herrington signed a lease
for some of UBS’s old space at the CBS Black Rock building, after the
troubled bank terminated its lease there early. CB Richard Ellis’ Brad
Gerla represented MarketAxess in the negotiations and CBRE’s Bob
Alexander, Sinclair Li and James Ackerson represented UBS. [more]