Life insurance companies are taking advantage of the volatile commercial mortgage market and tight lending strategies by Wall Street investment banks by becoming major lenders, the New York Times reported.

In the second quarter of 2011, life insurance companies underwrote $15.7 billion in new commercial mortgages — the largest number since the American Council of Life Insurers began keeping records in 1965.

“It is as if these guys died and went to heaven,” said Lawrence Longua, an associate professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. “Life insurance companies are pretty much the only game in town.” [more]

From left: Anthony DeGrotta, founder and principal at A.C. Lawrence & Co., and Bruno Ricciotti, Bond’s principal broker

Making a charge ripped from the pages of a thriller spy novel, residential and commercial brokerage A.C. Lawrence & Co. accused competing firm Bond New York and seven of its principals or agents of hacking into its proprietary listing system to steal valuable listings.

The lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court Sept. 20, claims that beginning in February, Bond, its agents and others broke into the listing system and stole the information, later contacting the owners of properties in an effort to poach the business.

A.C. Lawrence claims in the suit that it lost at least $100,000 in commissions “which would have been earned by plaintiff but, instead, were converted and wrongfully received by defendants,” and is seeking $5 million in punitive damages. “Bond vehemently denies all allegations in this frivolous and desperate suit by a competitor. Bond will aggressively defend the complaint,” said Bruno Ricciotti, Bond’s principal broker in a statement to The Real Deal.
[more]

Commercial services firm Cushman & Wakefield picked Glenn Rufrano, the head of an Australian-based owner of shopping centers, to replace outgoing CEO Bruce Mosler, the company said in a statement this morning. He will assume the position March 22. Rufrano is the outgoing CEO at Centro Properties Group, a position he has held for two years. He has been with Centro since it bought the large American shopping center real estate investment trust New Plan Excel Realty Trust in 2007, where he had been CEO. “We are confident that Glenn has the vision to lead Cushman & Wakefield, creating meaningful value for our clients, employees and other stakeholders,” said Carlo Barel di Sant’Albano, a Cushman & Wakefield board member and CEO of EXOR, the Italian investment company of the Agnelli family which owns Cushman. Cushman & Wakefield had said it was considering bringing in a new CEO from outside the real estate industry, but went with a veteran with a long record in real estate. Mosler will step down as CEO, but remain at the firm as co-chairman of the board, a position he took Jan. 1 this year. He announced he would step down in October. Lawrence Longua, clinical associate professor at the Schack Institute
of Real Estate at New York University, said Rufrano helped turn around
New Plan, after the REIT ran into trouble through aggressive
over-expansion. “He is very smart and knows real estate at the
property level,” Longua said. “Glenn was brought in and restructured
[New Plan] and strengthened the balance sheet.” [more]

Bruce Mosler, outgoing Cushman & Wakefield CEO

From the January issue: By any measure, 2009 was a tough year for commercial services firm Cushman & Wakefield. It suffered through the economic crisis with even greater losses for the first nine months of the year than two of its larger international rivals, CB Richard Ellis and Jones Lang LaSalle. While CBRE is struggling more in New York (see “CB Richard Ellis’ New York woes”), internationally, Cushman saw revenues down 25 percent, while operating expenses fell by just 22 percent, hurting the bottom line. Compounding matters, just two weeks after the third quarter ended, company president and CEO Bruce Mosler announced he would step down from the top spot and this month start “transitioning” into a position as a board co-chairman alongside John Cushman III. (He will remain as CEO until a successor is named.) To find a successor, privately held Cushman & Wakefield, owned by the publicly traded Italian company Exor, made the unusual decision to look both outside and inside the industry for a replacement, hiring executive search firm Spencer Stuart to bring in candidates. Mosler told The Real Deal he had always planned to stay in the CEO post for only five years after taking over in January 2005, and that the change was unrelated to company finances. Yet a senior broker at the firm said Exor, which bought Cushman in 2007, was “not terribly impressed” with his tenure. [more]

From the September issue: For a year now, real estate brokers and developers in New York have
been grappling with the ripple effect of the Lehman Brothers collapse
and the Wall Street fallout. But now, on this somewhat somber
anniversary, it’s time to start looking ahead and anticipating where
the market will be a year from now.
In this month’s Q & A, The Real Deal talked to
economists, brokers and firm principals who described what the
landscape will look like for sales activity, pricing, foreclosures and
employment in the next 12 months in the city. The predictions were not
all pretty.
Indeed, one economist said that prices will have dropped another 13 percent by next September. more

From the August issue: Manhattan’s residential real estate market might be feeling serious
pain, but many real estate insiders believe the city’s commercial
market will spend a much longer period in the doldrums.
While residential real estate is suffering from an oversupply of
inventory and a bursting price bubble largely spurred by a drop in
lending standards, commercial real estate is confronting obstacles on
the debt side that appear to be more entrenched. What’s more, experts
say the problems on the commercial side are in many ways just getting
started and will require far longer to sort themselves out.
For one, Manhattan’s office vacancy rate last month was 13.1
percent, and the commercial brokerage Colliers ABR is predicting it may
hit a high of 18 percent, significantly higher than the last downturn,
said Richard Bernstein, a vice chairman at the firm. [more]