The Real Deal New York

Tongues wagged in the industry last month when Gordon Golub, a top executive and 18-year veteran at residential real estate brokerage Citi Habitats, left the firm for the tech start-up Urban Compass. His departure is the latest in a series of significant changes at Citi Habitats, one of Manhattan’s largest firms and its most dominant rental company. Citi’s head of new development marketing, Clifford Finn, left for Douglas Elliman this fall, and his division was… [more]

While any New Yorker can see cranes dotting the Manhattan skyline and recognize that developers are back to building, an analysis by The Real Deal shows that there is a lot more construction coming down the pike than meets the eye. While market analysts often cite U.S. Census data as the industry standard when talking about upcoming residential construction in New York City, those figures, which show an anemic level of activity, look at the… [more]

To outsiders, it may be hard to distinguish between New York City’s big real estate firms. But behind the scenes, even firms of similar sizes and reputations can have vastly different ownership structures. Many of the city’s residential brokerages, for example, have long been privately owned by families. Others have large, publicly traded corporate parents. Still other owners have silent parents, or offer their brokers the opportunity to own a piece of the firm. These… [more]

The epic class-action lawsuit between the residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village and their former landlords began in 2007. But a November settlement of nearly $150 million in the suit — in which the residents claimed the owners illegally deregulated thousands of rent-stabilized apartments — has brought the case back into the spotlight. Indeed, tenants in other residential buildings are now filing similar lawsuits against their landlords, citing the landmark case. But the… [more]

Ask most people in the industry today and they’ll tell you Gary Barnett is the most aggressive of the large real estate developers in Manhattan. His appetite for risk among his peers is second to none. But given how many projects he has in the works — his firm, Extell Development Company, is currently working on roughly a dozen, including building two of the tallest residential buildings in the Western Hemisphere — and with the… [more]

So much for a winter slowdown. Even as the mercury dipped in January, demand for apartments was high. Driving the fast-moving market, experts said, were plunging inventory and low-interest financing. “Limited inventory options and increased demand will definitely push prices higher this winter,” said Lisa Strobing, an executive vice president at Bellmarc Realty, noting that January was as busy as springtime and saw “solid traffic.” The higher end of the market, which has been outpacing… [more]

… [more]

Burger’s big deals 944 Fifth Avenue: $50 million co-op 145 Central Park West (The San Remo): $20 million co-op 88 Central Park West (The Brentmore): $18.2 million combination co-op John Burger spends a lot of time walking through Central Park. The Brown Harris Stevens superbroker specializes in the grand apartment buildings located on the leafy thoroughfares bordering the park, and he prefers to travel between them on foot. “I do a lot on Central Park… [more]

The couple’s budget was reasonable: a one-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on the Upper East Side for about $650,000. But they didn’t want to face a brick wall, take on major renovations or pay more than $2,000 a month in maintenance costs. And after several months of hunting, they had come up empty-handed. “We were stuck — there wasn’t anything there,” their broker, Bond New York’s Margaret Garvey, told The Real Deal. So Garvey… [more]