Nine real estate investment trusts have filed to sell approximately $2.5 billion in shares since the beginning of the year, the most significant volume of deals since 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported, and the sales aren’t over yet. A $600 million offering from Pacific Investment Management and a $500 million deal by a unit of hedge fund Fortress Investment Group are both slated for the coming months.

Once one of the most desirable commodities on the stock market, reviews by the Securities and Exchange Commission could turn the tide for REITS, meaning they’ll be less likely to go public in the future.

The SEC is distinguishing between REITs that manage and operate real estate and those that invest in real estate securities, the Journal said. [more]

A penthouse unit in the Sheffield and Marketing Directors President Jacqueline Urgo

Three weeks ago, the Marketing Directors unveiled the 10 penthouses on the 56th and 57th floors of the Sheffield, and The Real Deal got a sneak peek at the units and their impressive views — just as the overcast weather cleared — today (see photos above). Asking prices for the two- and three-bedroom penthouses at the condominium conversion at 322 West 57th Street range from $2.55 million to $5.25 million for a unit overlooking Central Park, and apparently buyers won’t have much room for negotiation.

“We’re hardly open to any negotiations on those units — being that they are the crown jewels of the building,” Jacqueline Urgo, president of the Marketing Directors, said. “We’re going to hold out for the best prices.”
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Ofer YardeniFrom the December issue: At times, this city can seem like an ocean of distress without a drop to drink. Half-built or unsold condos abound. Office buildings dot marginal neighborhoods offering low rents to stay full. Loans secured by real estate are in trouble all over. Yet all this distressed commercial inventory can be elusive, kept off-limits by banks waiting for a full recovery and perhaps mindful that in the last downturn, in the early 1990s, they may have let go of valuable real estate too soon. Nonetheless, some are figuring out how to wrest control of these troubled properties, and this month The Real Deal compiled a scorecard of the big private equity funds clearly leading the way. [more]

Developers create layouts that can get bigger or smaller,
depending on what kind of buyer comes knocking

The Corner and developer David Picket

From the August issue: New York City developers are relieved that the market has picked up, but many have been caught off guard by the sudden change in buyers’ preferences.

To adapt, New York developers are speedily altering unit sizes and floor plans in upcoming projects and those already on the market — sometimes even before construction is finished.

Lower-end apartments are getting smaller to accommodate value-seeking buyers, and make it easier for them to get mortgages. At the other end of the spectrum, developers are combining more condo units to create larger apartments — sometimes at the request of specific buyers, other times in a preemptive attempt to target families or others looking for more space.

“Developers are doing everything they can to accommodate any potential buyer, so if it takes combining a unit, you combine a unit,” said Gerard Longo, the developer of new Tribeca condos Pearline Soap Factory and the Fairchild.

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Stuyvesant Town

From the August issue: These are busy times for the usually obscure companies that specialize in distressed commercial loans. With investors defaulting on billions of dollars of debt nationwide, so-called special servicers are gaining new prominence. The companies — which handle securitized loans on the verge of default to ensure that bond holders can be paid off — are not only raking in lucrative fees, they’re also being courted and, in some cases, acquired by high-profile investors looking to cash in on the credit crunch. “Everybody is trying to buy one of these,” said Stephen Emery of Mission Capital, a loan sale advisory firm with offices in Lower Manhattan.

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Bob Novogratz and wife Cortney, the developing duo from Bravo’s “9 by Design” reality show, are designing Cabana, the
Jersey Shore’s second boutique hotel, the Post reported. Bob is the brother of billionaire Mike Novogratz, the co-founder and president of Fortress Investment Group. The couple also designed Bungalow, Jersey’s first boutique beach hotel, which opened last summer. Their company, Sixx Design, just signed on to design a 48-room boutique hotel in the Mexican resort town of Punta Mita, their first project outside of the United States, slated to open on Thanksgiving 2011. [Post]

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Bob Novogratz and wife Cortney, the developing duo from Bravo’s “9 by Design” reality show, are designing Cabana, the
Jersey Shore’s second boutique hotel, the Post reported. Bob is the brother of billionaire Mike Novogratz, the co-founder and president of Fortress Investment Group. The couple also designed Bungalow, Jersey’s first boutique beach hotel, which opened last summer. Their company, Sixx Design, just signed on to design a 48-room boutique hotel in the Mexican resort town of Punta Mita, their first project outside of the United States, slated to open on Thanksgiving 2011. [Post]

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Kent Swig and Sheffield57

The luxury condos at Sheffield57 are back on the market at an average of 25 percent off their boom-time asking prices, according to the Wall Street Journal. The 57-story former rental tower at 322 West 57th Street, purchased for a record $418 million in 2005 by a group of investors led by embattled developer Kent Swig, is now widely considered one of the most troubled condo conversions in New York City history. In a foreclosure auction last year, Swig lost the project to Fortress Investment Group, which has since brought in new managers and put the condos back up for sale at an average of $1,500 per square foot. Swig’s group had been asking $2,100 per square foot for the homes at their initial sales launch. [WSJ] 

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993 Park Avenue (Source: PropertyShark); Top right: Seller Robert Kramer; Bottom Right: Agent S. Jean Meisel

After financier Robert Kramer and his wife, Susan, purchased a three-bedroom co-op unit at 993 Park Avenue for $3.95 million in 2000, they gut-renovated the home and redid the floor plan.

The renovation involved tearing down the walls of several small staff rooms to open up the kitchen and family rooms, putting in a new air conditioning system and expanding the master bedroom suite, according to the agent now charged with reselling the place.

It must have been quite the job for Kramer, a Fortress Investment Group alum who went on to co-found private investment firm Altitude Capital Partners, and his wife, because the eighth-floor apartment, unit 8BC, hit the market today for $9.25 million — more than twice what the couple paid for it 10 years ago.

“Very little was untouched” in the rehab, said listing agent S. Jean Meisel of Brown Harris Stevens, who also had the listing the last time around, when the Kramers bought it. Meisel would neither confirm nor deny that the Kramers own the co-op, but property records show that unit 8BC does, indeed, belong to the couple.

The Kramers were not immediately available for comment.

Interior pictures are not yet available and Meisel did not know the square footage of the apartment, so for the unconvinced, she promises the new, 140-square-foot closet — one of the largest she’s ever seen in a master bedroom — is worth raving about. “It would have been wonderful for ‘Sex and the City,’” she said. [more]

The 5,500-square-foot penthouse at 1 Central Park West, sold for $33 million, including closing costs, to financier Taek Jho Low, has taken its spot as the priciest single-unit residential foreclosure sale ever in New York City, the Post reported. Donald Trump purchased the apartment in 1997 for $5 million and flipped it one year later to film producer Vittorio Ceechi Gori for $10.4 million. Gori tried to renovate place, but was foreclosed upon in 2008, with as much as $30 million in debt to lender Fortress Investment Group, plus $62,000 to the condo board and $69,000 in back taxes. The apartment was sold for $18 million at auction last July to a Russian family who wound up famously walking away from their $1.8 million deposit after discovering the high costs of renovation. [Post] [more]