Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and several other notable investors have turned bullish on the U.S. housing market, the Wall Street Journal reported, buying up shares of home building companies, like Pulte Group, Beazer Homes and Hovnanian Enterprises. Those stocks are up 30 percent since the end of the third quarter, according to Dow Jones, far outpacing the 10.5 percent increase recorded by the Standard & Poor’s 500.

In a recent report, Goldman said it expects home prices to decline 3 percent next year, before gaining 30 percent — not taking inflation into account — through 2022 [more]

Insurance giant Manulife Financial, the Toronto-based parent of John Hancock Financial, said today that it bought 10 Exchange Place, a 30-story trophy office tower in Jersey City, for $285 million, marking the company’s first major acquisition in the New York City market.

Manulife, the largest insurance firm in Canada, outbid a number of rival firms for the 748,000-square-foot building, located on the Hudson River waterfront and home to tenants including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Ace Insurance.

Atlanta-based Invesco sold the property after placing the building up for sale through a bidding process that started earlier this year, however Manulife’s managed to top all rival offers in the first round, eventually settling on a price of $381 a square foot. [more]

Boston Properties has sold Two Grand Central to an affiliate of Rockwood Capital for $401 million, Real Estate Weekly reported. Rockwood assumed the $176.6 million mortgage in the transaction.

The tower, also known as 140 East 45th Street, was owned in a joint venture between U.S. Real Estate Opportunities I L.P, a fund managed by Goldman Sachs, and Boston Properties, which had a 60 percent stake in the building, which is between 44th and 45th streets. The real estate investment trust, founded by Mortimer Zuckerman in 1970, said in an earnings call it received $125.9 million for its portion of the structure. [more]

Clockwise from top left: Andrew Singer of the Singer & Bassuk Organization, 77 Water Street and Kathleen McSharry of the Singer & Bassuk OrganizationThe 26-story office building 77 Water Street in Lower Manhattan, which is net-leased in its entirety by financial giant Goldman Sachs, was refinanced with a $45 million loan from AXA-Equitable.

The loan was arranged by the Singer & Bassuk Organization on behalf of the building’s owners, the William Kaufman Organization and Travelers Insurance, according to a statement from Singer & Bassuk. The refinancing on the 600,000-square-foot building, located between Gouverneur Lane and William Street, closed Oct. 21, according to Singer & Bassuk CEO Andrew Singer, who negotiated the deal with
senior managing director Kathleen McSharry. – Adam Pincus [more]

Greg Agran, head of commodities trading at Goldman Sachs, has purchased a condominium unit at Tribeca’s trendiest new development, Tribeca flair V33 at 33 Vestry Street, for $6.16 million, the New York Observer reported.

Agran, who also owns a $13 million apartment six blocks north at 13 Harrison Street with his wife, purchased the four-bedroom, three-bathroom unit through an LLC by the name of Morning Dew but the deed was signed in his own name, according to the Observer.

The building on Vestry Street is one of a kind, said Wendy Maitland, a broker for Town Residential who has had the listing. “It’s a 52-foot-wide lot,” she explained. [more]

Anglo Irish Bank protestFrom the October issue: The auction of Anglo Irish Bank’s troubled $9.5 billion U.S. loan portfolio has surprised some industry observers — and spread fear among some borrowers, who worry about having new lenders take over their troubled projects.

Ben Thypin, a senior market analyst at Real Capital Analytics, said the fact that three lenders divvied up Anglo Irish’s portfolio was” not particularly unexpected.”

“No one but a bank could really afford to buy the performing loans, so the performers and non performers inevitably went to different buyers,” he said.

But what was surprising was who ended up at the winners’ table — Lone Star Funds acquired about $5 billion in sub- and nonperforming loans, while Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase acquired the remaining performing loans in separate transactions.
[more]

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase

From the October issue: Wall Street is a place, but it’s also a state of mind. And that’s true now more than ever, as the headquarters of New York’s most powerful banks are no longer clustered on one particular Financial District thoroughfare.
Likewise, the homes belonging to the bosses of Wall Street’s biggest firms aren’t concentrated in any one place either. While there’s still some historic bias toward Uptown over Downtown, not every Wall Street titan gravitates toward the most exclusive white-glove co-ops. In addition, the success that these high-finance wizards have had with their NYC residential real estate investments is also all over the map.
What follows is The Real Deal’s rundown of who, where, and how they’ve done. First up is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whose address is 1185 Park Avenue. Click here for more. [more]

From the September issue: In the last few weeks, as many of the city’s big banks have been besieged by bad news, and the stock market has seesawed sharply in a short span of time, the question on many analysts’ minds is: Could a new round of pain on Wall Street trickle down to New York’s already vulnerable commercial and residential real estate markets?

Indeed, the thinking goes, the financial services industry and its numerous offices keep commercial occupancy rates high in Manhattan, while its well-paid executives buoy the high-end residential market. Meanwhile, its lower-rung workers drive demand for rental units, sources say. Wall Street has served as an economic engine of the city for decades,
ever since major manufacturing and energy companies — like Mobil, Exxon
and chemical company Union Carbide — abandoned their New York
corporate headquarters in the 1970s and 1980s for other (cheaper)
addresses. [more]
[more]

Illustration by David ColeJuly 27 was a dark day for commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS.
On that day, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup were set to begin selling a $1.5 billion batch of CMBS, secured in part by some New York City properties.
But at the last minute, Standard & Poor’s essentially put the kibosh on the deal. The rating agency said it had discovered a “glitch” in its methodology and would need more time to vouch for the worth of the mortgages at the heart of the bonds. Without the blessing of S & P, the deal died. And with that, the CMBS market — in which pools of real estate loans are bundled together and sold to investors — hit a major snag few had anticipated when the year began.
S & P’s move — along with wild stock market fluctuations, concerns about the debt crisis in Europe and the renewed round of economic problems — helped knock the wind out of the sails of the CMBS market and confirmed the industry’s worst fears of a slowdown. Many expected the CMBS market to quadruple in value from $13 billion in 2010 to $50 billion by the end of 2011, as investors started to regain faith in the strength of the commercial real estate market. Instead, they now expect CMBS issuances to be just $30 billion this year, which calls into question reports of the market’s recovery. [more]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency plans to sue Bank of America,
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, accusing them of
misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities they assembled and
sold at the height of the housing bubble, and seeking billions of
dollars in compensation, the New York Times reported. The lawsuits
follow subpoenas the FHFA issued a year ago. The timing of the suits
is related to a statute of limitations that expires next Wednesday.The
lawsuits will allege that the banks did not fulfill their duties under
securities law, and didn’t pay attention to the fact that borrowers’
incomes were infalted or falsified. [more]