Last week’s sales of Forest City Realty and Kushner Companies’ interest in the office portion of 666 Fifth Avenue were just the latest examples of New York’s real estate families ceding ground to institutional, corporate companies.
“Thirty years ago, it was an industry largely dominated by families,” Brookfield Property Group CEO Brian Kingston, whose company was on the buy side of both deals, told the Financial Times.
Companies like Brookfield, the Blackstone Group and the Related Companies are backed by pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds that are looking for higher yields than the bond markets produce.
And Kingston said that’s “brought more discipline to the sector.”
“You don’t see situations of a massive oversupply then a crash,” he said. “The boom-bust cycle seems to be shallower.”
Even before Brookfield struck a deal to buy Forest City for $11.4 billion, the Ratner family had already lost some measure of control over the public company, which Bruce Ratner had walked away from in 2016. [FT] – Rich Bockmann