Burton Resnick, CEO of one of New York City’s largest property ownership firms, Jack Resnick & Sons, sat down with the New York Times for a one-on-one interview, published over the weekend. In it, Resnick talked about his latest project, a conversion at 250 Hudson Street that he said took just three months, and the New York City market recovery. “We have a real estate problem here in New York and throughout the big cities,” Resnick said, in reference to the down commercial and housing markets. Still, he argued that the U.S. faces bigger economic issues beyond housing. “[The real estate problem] pales in comparison to the problems that the country has as far as manufacturing is concerned and the overall unemployment rate.”

CBRE’s Enoch Lawrence (left) and Sam Chandan of Real Estate Econometrics

In a sign of how troubled the market for bonds backed by commercial
real estate may be, and by extension, the future of some office
building owners, a key deadline for federal bailout money designed to
get money flowing again to landlords has come and gone without any
takers. Up until June 16, investors in those bonds, like insurance companies,
hedge funds and credit unions, had been invited to dip into the Term
Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, to borrow some of the
$200 billion fund set by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The chief reason there’s been zero interest in TALF so far, according to industry analysts, economists and brokers, is that there hasn’t been enough time to put complicated deals together. Indeed, it was only in May that the Fed announced that commercial mortgages would be eligible for TALF money, and a month wasn’t long enough for lenders to market their assets to willing buyers, they say. [more]