The Real Deal New York

From left: Elliman’s Hervé Senequier and Leonard Steinberg and BHS’s Kathy SloaneIt’s always been difficult to rank the city’s top real estate agents, given the lack of publicly available information about their performance — at least when measured by cold, hard data. But for the first time ever this month, The Real Deal compiled a ranking of luxury sellers’ agents based on the dollar volume of their closed sales, rather than listings. And we’ve drilled down even farther, discovering who reigns supreme in different corners of Manhattan. [more]

New York City HallWith all the coverage surrounding the upcoming presidential election, New York City’s 2013 mayoral race feels a long way off. But that’s not the case for the politicos running for mayor — or even those rumored to be considering it. Most have already been collecting campaign contributions for months or years, in many cases from prominent figures in the city’s real estate industry. [more]

A rendering of 51 Astor PlaceIn New York City, possibly the only thing rarer than a developer who can get a $100 million-plus construction loan these days is a developer who can get one to build a speculative office tower. Recently, Edward Minskoff surmounted both hurdles, winning approval for a $165 million loan to build a flashy, 400,000-square-foot, 13-story office tower in the heart of Astor Place, an area one doesn’t normally associate with new office space. [more]

14 Buckingham Drive in Alpine, N.J., sold for $6.2 million.It’s a question many New Yorkers, especially those with children, ask themselves at some point: Buy an apartment in the city, or spend the same amount on a spacious house in the suburbs? When choosing the latter, New Yorkers often flock to the stately homes, McMansions and well-tended lawns of a few affluent counties just outside the city’s borders: Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Fairfield County in Connecticut and Bergen County in New Jersey. [more]

From left: Rapid Realty’s Anthony Lolli, Adrian Cardona, Gabriela Falquez and Carlos AngelucciRapid Realty’s Brooklyn headquarters was buzzing on a Thursday afternoon last month, as agents jostled for space at computers lining the exposed-brick wall. For an office housing 30 agents, the sleekly designed space is tiny — only around 500 square feet. [more]

Ian Schrager

Ian Schrager is chairman and CEO of Ian Schrager Company, a hotel and real estate development firm established in 2005. Prior to establishing the company, Schrager was at Morgans Hotel Group, which he cofounded in 1984 with the late Steve Rubell, with whom he created the legendary nightclub, Studio 54, in 1977. Schrager’s more high-profile New York projects include the 2006 redesign of the Gramercy Park Hotel as well as residential properties such as 40 Bond and the Gramercy Park Hotel’s 50 Gramercy Park North condos. [more]

A Central Park West mansion belonging to retired Coach executive Keith Monda sold last month for $22.4 million, a record price for a single-family townhouse on the Upper West Side. The purchase kicks off the New Year with echoes of 2011: luxury real estate maintaining (or even exceeding) its pre-crash values, and a wealthy foreigner — in this case, international buyer Igor Iankovsky — swooping in to own a piece of New York City. [more]

Hollywood is gearing up for the Academy Awards this month, but the New York City real estate industry has its own glamorous red-carpet event. Some 2,200 industry stars attended the Real Estate Board of New York’s 116th Annual Banquet at the New York Hilton last month. The crowd included real estate royalty like REBNY Chairman Mary Ann Tighe and developer Douglas Durst, along with politicos Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. [more]

When legal recruiter Annie Sud got engaged in 2009, she quickly realized that her 500-square-foot Chelsea co-op was too small for her and her fiancé, so the couple rented a larger apartment together. But in the depths of the real estate downturn, Sud couldn’t find a buyer willing to match what she’d paid for her co-op only two years earlier. And when she approached the board for permission to rent out the unit, the answer was no: The building had already reached the maximum number of units it allows to be rented at any given time.

Sud had no choice but to keep the apartment on the market, sitting empty, while she paid $3,000 for her mortgage each month. It finally sold in October 2011 for less than the purchase price. [more]

Ever since the credit crunch barreled into Manhattan, New York City condo developers have partnered with preferred lenders to help their buyers get mortgages in a difficult financing climate.

Until recently, however, individual home sellers rarely got involved in buyers’ mortgage woes. But that is now starting to change, brokers say. [more]

Elizabeth SampleThe 1 percent is alive and well in Manhattan, where the luxury real estate market has generated plenty of headlines lately. With Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill’s pending $88 million sale at Central Park West and a $110 million listing at Gary Barnett’s under-construction One57, the high-end Manhattan market has been impossible to ignore.

This month, The Real Deal talked to some of the city’s top brokers and market analysts to find out what’s behind the splashy headlines. Why is the luxury market doing so well while there’s still softness in the rest of the New York City market — and the rest of the country, for that matter? [more]

During the worst depths of the real estate downturn, many Manhattan landlords paid brokers’ fees — usually the equivalent of a month’s rent — rather than asking tenants to pay them. That way, owners could quickly fill vacant units by advertising “No Fee” apartments.

But now that practice — known as an OP for “owner paid” — is being replaced. Instead, landlords are paying brokers a commission equal to only half a month’s rent, in a sign of the rental market’s recent strength, brokers said. [more]

Ryan Stenta

Financial District
$385,000
1 Wall Street Court

Studio, one-bath, 367 sf condo unit in a 15-story doorman building; apartment has open kitchen with stainless steel appliances, glass and walnut-finished cabinetry and Italian porcelain tile floors; building has roof terrace, concierge and party room; common charges $450 per month; asking price $399,000; 150 days on the market. (Brokers: Ryan Stenta, Keller Williams NYC; Piero Massimino, Vivaldi Real Estate) [more]

Industry professionals expected little from the Manhattan office leasing market at the start of 2012. And a month into the New Year, they’ve been right in their predictions.

Noticeably lacking is a headline-grabbing deal, such as the one that supply-chain firm Li & Fung inked for 490,000 square feet in the Empire State Building in the first week of 2011. [more]

Brookfield’s Jerry Larkin (left) and Cushman’s Bruce Mosler

If Brookfield Office Properties’ newly aggressive stance in Manhattan isn’t keeping Related Companies’ Stephen Ross and Silverstein Properties’ Larry Silverstein awake at night, it probably should be. Publicly traded Brookfield Office Properties, led by CEO Ric Clark, is looking to lease up as much as 10 million square feet of office space over the next few years in Manhattan — which may be the most space any private company has ever put on the market at one time. [more]

Membership at the industry’s leading trade group, the Real Estate Board of New York, is at an all-time high, but outside of public view there is a constant turnover of its ranks.

This month, The Real Deal did a first-ever analysis of REBNY membership, comparing the Class of 2012 to the Class of 2011 to see who joined — and who dropped out — this year. [more]

From left: Barry Sternlicht and Howard Michaels

With every crisis comes opportunity, and the European debt crisis is no exception — especially for savvy real estate investors.

The uncertainty on the continent has brought a battered currency, struggling economy and stubbornly high unemployment. Indeed, financial land mines have popped up from the Mediterranean to the Celtic seas. [more]

From left: Sam Zell, Jeff Blau and Jerry Speyer

Until a few years ago, Brazil was but a Plan B among America’s real estate investors. Now they increasingly view South America’s largest nation as a lucrative, and safe, haven for commercial property investment.

“Brazil is a democracy, Brazil has a free press, Brazil elected a left-wing president back in 2002,” Hines Interests senior vice president Doug Munro told The Real Deal by phone last month from his São Paulo office. “Brazil [now] has control over its inflation concerns of the past. In the 1980s, Brazil was just a basket case in terms of the management of its economy. [more]

Jersey City commercial buildings for sale

Three contiguous commercial properties at 33 Journal Square and 912-920 and 922-924 Bergen Avenue in Jersey City are on the market with a combined asking price of $20 million. Located in the Journal Square neighborhood, the buildings include about 60,000 square feet of space and occupy an entire block front. National retail tenants such as Bally Total Fitness, 7-Eleven, Radio Shack and Popeyes lease space at the properties. David Schechtman, Paul Nigido and Gary Meese of Eastern Consolidated are handling the sale. [more]

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Malibu home sold for $12 million.

Chicago

Shorenstein Properties paid $292 million last month to purchase Chicago’s 350 West Mart Center from Vornado Realty Trust, the Wall Street Journal reported. One of the nation’s largest commercial owners, Shorenstein Properties plans to put its Chicago headquarters in the recently purchased building, located in the city’s River North area. Currently 85 percent occupied, 350 West Mart houses retailers, wholesalers and some office tenants. In the next five years, Shorenstein will spend around $20 million to convert the building entirely to office space, according to Charlie Malet, Shorenstein’s executive vice president of investments. [more]

Though its demise drew little attention because of the partisan year-end brawl over the payroll tax cut extension in Congress, a key mortgage financing benefit disappeared at the end of December: the ability of large numbers of homebuyers and owners to write off the premiums they pay for mortgage insurance.

The loss of that tax deduction — plus mandatory new fees imposed by Congress on all new conventional and Federal Housing Administration loans — could effectively ratchet up the costs of home-ownership this year. [more]

“Jersey Shore” house most viewed in 2011: Zillow last month released a list of the Top 10 Most Viewed Homes on its site for 2011. Topping the list was the “Jersey Shore” house — a six-bedroom home in Seaside Heights that famously hosted the hard-partying cast of the popular MTV reality show. The 1209 Ocean Terrace home, which rents for $6,500 per night in the summer, beat out even the White House: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue placed eighth on Zillow’s list. [more]

Cuomo plans nation’s biggest convention center in Queens

Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month unveiled plans to bring a massive convention center to the newly opened Aqueduct Racetrack complex in Queens. The state is working with developer Genting Group, which currently runs Aqueduct’s racino, on the proposed $4 billion, 3.8 million-square-foot project. With 3,000 hotel rooms, the facility would be the country’s largest convention center. The first phase of the project is expected to be completed by 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal, though Genting has yet to sign an agreement to begin construction. The new facility would replace Manhattan’s Javits Center, which Cuomo described as “obsolete,” the Journal said. [more]

Now in his 90th year, Kevin Roche has never seemed more incandescently consequential than he does today. In the past three months, with the completion of an overhaul of both the American and the Islamic wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roche has lived to see the fulfillment of the master plan that he and his partner, John Dinkeloo, devised over 40 years ago, when the ebullient Thomas Hoving was still the museum’s director. [more]

Don Peebles

High-profile developer Don Peebles has opened his first Manhattan office. Head of the Peebles Corporation, the country’s largest African-American real estate development company, Peebles this fall moved with his family from Miami to the Upper West Side, he told The Real Deal, and has opened a Peebles Corp. office at 590 Madison Avenue in Midtown. Now, he said, he is working on plans for a new Downtown condo development, and his firm is currently in negotiations to acquire potential sites for the project in Soho, Tribeca and Chelsea. [more]

Stribling & Associates has launched a new website, part of a branding overhaul aimed at revamping the 32-year-old firm’s somewhat “stuffy” image, according to Stribling director of operations Christopher Wilson.

The firm’s previous site was built in the late 1990s, said Wilson, who oversaw the December debut of the new site. Stribling hired Co-op, a Manhattan-based branding and marketing agency, to update the firm’s image. [more]

Veteran broker Michael Shapot, along with a team of six agents, has moved from Prudential Douglas Elliman to the year-old residential brokerage Keller Williams NYC.

Shapot brought six members of the Michael Shapot Team to Keller Williams’s new 425 Park Avenue location: Luis Vazquez, Carson Alexander, Ying Li-Oshrin, Jim Biting, Elizabeth Edwards and one more who is finalizing departure plans. (Other members of the team decided to stay at Elliman.) [more]

Lucie Holt

When Lucie Holt departed London — and her job as a mortgage broker — for New York City 15 years ago, real estate sales seemed like a natural fit. But the British broker never thought the career choice would land her on national television.

Holt, now a senior vice president at Citi Habitats, made her TV debut last month on HGTV’s “Selling New York,” the real estate reality show that’s become a must-see for residential brokers in the city. [more]

Wannabe developers who fancy themselves the next Stephen Ross or Gary Barnett can now practice building their own city skyscrapers, thanks to a new iPhone application.

Called “Tiny Tower,” the addictive game lets players build their own high-rises — and collect rent from the “bitizens” that inhabit them — in real time. Designed by NimbleBit, a Solana Beach, Calif.–based company founded by twin brothers Ian and David Marsh, “Tiny Tower” launched in June, and was named Apple’s 2011 iPhone Game of the Year. [more]

Mayor John Lindsay

1967: FIRMS BEGIN CORPORATE EXODUS FROM NYC

Major corporations like PepsiCo and the American Can Company announced they would leave Manhattan for suburban campuses 45 years ago this month, making them among the first in a commercial real estate exodus that battered the city the following decade. [more]

TRD Editor-in-Chief Stuart Elliott

One fixture of every presidential election — including this one — is the battle between candidates over what they’ve earned and what’s been given to them in life.

Mitt Romney, son of a prominent politician and a product of the corporate establishment, like George W. Bush before him, has faced an uphill battle trying to shed that image. President Obama, on the other hand, may have challenges in the upcoming election, including diminished support from the business community, but he still has the advantage of his up-from-bootstraps life story. [more]