The Real Deal wins Best in Business Award

Publication honored in SABEW’s general excellence category

The Real Deal wins Best in Business Award

The Real Deal has won a general excellence award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.

TRD received the honor — its third general excellence award from SABEW — in the industry publication category for stories published in 2020.

The winning submission included:

An in-depth feature about 220 Central Park South, the world’s most successful condominium, by E.B. Solomont and Hiten Samtani. The story examined how a limestone tower overlooking Central Park reaped over $1 billion in profits and came to encapsulate not just the blood sport of luxury New York real estate but also the city’s extreme wealth inequality.

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Matthew Blake’s profile of Mohammed Hadid, a Palestinian-American pioneer of megamansion spec homes in Los Angeles. The piece illustrated the often sordid business of development and explored themes of celebrity, racism and the extreme ends to which builders go to cater to the very rich.

An inside look by Rich Bockmann, Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Keith Larsen at what happened when a developer’s grand ambitions met the harsh reality of a declining market. They told the tale of HFZ Capital Group, a Manhattan builder that paid nearly $900 million for a pile of dirt with hopes of a billion-dollar payoff only to find itself at the brink of disaster.

A gripping investigation into Prodigy Network, a real estate crowdfunding platform, by Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Mary Diduch. Their narrative pieced together what went wrong at the firm and who should be held accountable for its $690 million crowdfunding implosion — the industry’s largest to date.

Erin Hudson’s breaking story on state regulators’ attempt to flip New York City’s rental market on its head. The broker-fee ban turned into one of the biggest real estate stories of the year.