What happened?
It’s the key question, not just of journalism, but of conversation, storytelling, life.
In our reporting, when an event makes news, we cover it. But that doesn’t always explain everything, and often we (and our readers) want to know more. Real estate is an enormous, economically vital industry, and much of it is opaque.
I think curiosity is a virtue, but George Washington didn’t, at least not for those who’d like to be in civil society. “Be not curious to know the affairs of others; neither, approach those that speak in private,” the first president wrote.
Short of being in every room, reporting for The Real Deal means we have to ask around when we know the endpoint, like a building sale or a bankruptcy, but we don’t know the full story (yet).
Many newsmakers prefer no eavesdroppers. But every now and again comes something like transparency, a direct reply to the inquiry.
On stage at the Miami Forum, developer Patrick Carroll spelled it out. For more than a year, as Francisco Alvarado writes in our cover story about him, Carroll displayed bizarre behavior: firing guns from his boat, fleeing police and reaming out customer service employees at a Bentley car dealership and an Apple Store in videos for his own Instagram account. He told the audience what had happened. He was dealing with undiagnosed bipolar disorder spurred by having too much time on his hands, he said. He’d sold his company but couldn’t work thanks to a noncompete.
“His candor in front of thousands was his way of normalizing mental health struggles,” Alvarado writes. He also wanted to show everyone he was better, and position himself for a return to the industry when the noncompete is done in 2027.
It’s December, so we also take stock of the year behind us. What happened? President Donald Trump took office for a second term, elevating real estate’s Howard Lutnick and Steve Witkoff, making landlords who depend on vouchers nervous and kicking off Opportunity Zones 2.0. Perhaps in response, New York City — and Seattle — elected mayors with socialist platforms who promised to make life “affordable.” The real estate industry wondered how that occurred, and then retrenched to try to understand what would happen next. We saw green shoots in the office market. Building continued in South Florida, and luxury real estate thrived, even in an unlikely inland area of Palm Beach called Stone Creek Ranch. Distress continued to play out, and we covered the culmination of some drawn-out problems.
Alex Sapir, son of Georgian real estate mogul Tamir Sapir, onetime owner of 11 Madison Avenue, has sold off much of the portfolio he inherited. In the fall, he put a company that owns two properties (a New York City hotel and a South Florida development site) into bankruptcy to help with the sale; he also shed a trophy property on Madison Avenue. Here’s the story about what’s going on.
The Alexander brothers, former star brokers, Oren and Tal, and their brother Alon, are headed to trial early next year after spending 2025 in jail. How will it go? Katherine Kallergis, Sheridan Wall and Ellen Cranley pull out the brothers’ defense strategy and describe new information prosecutors will lean on.
TRD readers by this point have a sense of the New York City real estate player, and the kind of builder who builds in South Florida. In this issue, Texas Bureau Chief and Senior Reporter Jess Hardin profiles Mehrdad Moayedi, who, in becoming arguably the most prolific single-family lot developer in Dallas-Fort Worth, also came to define the archetypal North Texas real estate guy: affable but sharp, and trusting in God and country.
Elsewhere in the issue, Kari Hamanaka looks at what happens for residential brokers in life after reality television. Josh Flagg, fourth-gen Angeleno, lived for 15 seasons on “Million-Dollar Listing Los Angeles.” But as he takes the lead at his family’s commercial real estate business while juggling his own projects, he’s trying to tell the local industry that he’s a true contender in the world of real estate, not just a spoiled rich kid.
The retail investors deep in Discord channels can probably give you the best accounting of iBuyer Opendoor’s much-hyped CEO changeover last summer. In a piece about life under the new leadership, Jake Indursky mines the chatter and analyzes the latest to paint a picture of a company tightening its belt, getting back to its techy roots and trying again to buy and sell houses online.
This issue also contains our rundown of the luxury market in Hawaii (see the print issue) and rankings of top brokers and brokerages in Chicago, where residential real estate is navigating both a dearth of listings and major consolidation.
What will happen next? We’ll be writing about it.
Enjoy the holiday season, and the issue.