34 Greene Street and Sorgente’s Veronica Mainetti

Sales launched recently at the Sorgente Group’s 34 Greene Street, a new seven-unit Soho condo with plenty of elegant touches, and foreign buyers have since been paying it a lot of attention. Sorgente, which purchased the Flatiron Building last year and has been rumored to be zeroing in on the Woolworth Building, acquired 34 Greene in 2007. “Initially, it was primarily Europeans [looking for] a pied-a-terre,” said Jason Karadus of Prudential Douglas Elliman, who is the listing broker. “Europeans are less interested in things like a spa, a concierge and cold storage, and a lot of bells and whistles. They want something a little more quintessentially New York.” The condo may not have fancy amenities, but it does have a 5,000-square-foot duplex penthouse with 15-foot ceilings and 2,200 square feet of private outdoor space — which has been readied for the installation of a swimming pool. The penthouse is listed at $13.75 million and has already received a $10 million all-cash offer, which Sorgente’s Veronica Mainetti turned down. Downstairs, a European buyer has already snapped up a two-bedroom, 1,997-square-foot unit. It is in contract for about $4 million. [Post] [more]

Veronica Mainetti heads the Sorgente Group’s U.S. office.

From the January issue:
For more than a year, foreign investors have been sitting on the
sidelines waiting for a sign that the capital markets were beginning to
thaw and the time was right to invest in New York real estate.
One of the first big tests for them may be coming from an unlikely
source: the Sorgente Group, a Rome-based investment firm that has
already acquired some of the city’s most iconic properties and is
currently negotiating to buy another — the famed Woolworth Building in
Lower Manhattan.
In addition to those Gotham properties, the group, headed by
investor Valter Mainetti, is reportedly in talks to acquire some of the
most sought-after buildings in the United States, including San
Francisco’s TransAmerica Pyramid.  More

From left: Vishaan Chakrabarti, Helena Durst and Jared Seligman

As a new decade arrives, so does the latest crop of boat-rockers, according to the Observer, which released its list of “insurgents” yesterday. The list contains the 50-plus “punks who will make this city hum again,” the Observer said, including several real estate bigwigs. Helena Durst, assistant vice president for the Durst Organization, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s 23-year-old whiz kid Jared Seligman, Veronica Mainetti, head of investment management firm Sorgente Group’s U.S. activities; Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the real estate development program at Columbia University as well as president of the Moynihan Station venture; and Jonathan Butler, the Brooklyn real estate blogger who founded Brownstoner, were among the real estate players named on the list. “The ‘insurgents’ may not know it yet, but they’re about to remake this town in ways many of us can’t even fathom,” the Observer editors wrote. “Meet the people who are going to make the [next decade] worth watching.” Other listees include Jonathan Gray, senior managing director of the Blackstone Group, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, reporter and author of “Too Big to Fail.” [NYO]

From the April issue: Normally the cash-rich Italian real estate giant Sorgente Group follows
a simple investment strategy: It buys and patiently holds and manages
iconic skyscrapers in major cities around the world, including the
Flatiron Building, which it acquired in January. “Our plans have a life
of over 20 years,” said Veronica Mainetti, daughter of Sorgente CEO
Valter Mainetti and head of its New York-based U.S. office. “We’re not
going to start with the conversion of Flatiron today — maybe 10 years
from now.” Meanwhile, the company will rent the Flatiron to existing
tenants and watch the recession come and (it hopes) go. But Sorgente’s
new venture in New York City, a luxury for-sale condominium development
company operating within a severely stepped-up timeframe — not 20
years but 18 months — is being forced to respond to here-and-now
market conditions. [more]