From left: Town Residential’s David Salvatore, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Sonia Stock and Fredrik Eklund, UrbanDigs’ Noah Rosenblatt and Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats

With the stock market posting its best first quarter in 14 years, real estate agents and brokers are beaming about the effect it’s having on interest, sales volume and open house attendance in their day-to-day business, despite little data to definitively confirm a causal relationship between the performance of stocks and the real estate market (see charts prepared for The Real Deal by Miller Samuel after the jump)…. [more]

Commercial real estate giant CB Richard Ellis announced today that it will sell 14 million shares of its Class A stock to hedge fund Paulson & Co. for $100 million and plans to raise another $50 million in periodic stock sales in order to pay down its debt of nearly $2.4 billion. Most of that debt was incurred following CBRE’s $1.9 billion purchase of Trammell Crow in 2006. CBRE owes $310 million in debt payments beginning next year, according to Bloomberg data. CBRE stock rose 15 percent to $9.38 per share in afternoon trading today. TRD … [more]

Stocks rose today after unexpected increases in pending home sales and construction spending. The Dow Jones jumped about 150 points and stocks overall rose about 2 percent. Pending home sales rose 3.2 percent for the second straight month, according to the National Association of Realtors. Construction spending rose 0.3 percent in March after a five-month drop. It remains to be seen whether the market will continue rising once the April employment report comes out Friday.