It wasn’t everything real estate wanted, but it should do the trick.
Last month, New York state’s budget was unveiled, with a housing package that ended a long gridlock.
The package revived a property tax break for development, encouraged office-to-residential conversions and changed renovation rules for rent-stabilized apartments. It also enacted good cause eviction, which the industry had fought.
Taken together, the measures “promise to help thaw the environment for developers.”
Things look a little more hopeful now.
These days, thankfully, we seem to have come out of the urban doom loop spiral as well.
Some office properties are being converted to residential. Towers are finding new owners after distress. And some investors are snapping up once-maligned Class B office buildings, including in Texas.
“There are more buyers than there were six months ago, when I was the only guy,” noted Doug Agarwal, the founder of Capital Commercial, which has emerged as the top buyer of aging office properties in Texas. Check out our stories on this trend in the Austin area and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Maybe we can even start to think big about the future of our cities.
That was the message at The Real Deal’s Salon Series event last month with former New York City deputy mayor for economic development Dan Doctoroff.
Doctoroff, who is now battling ALS, took the job despite scant experience in 2002, kicking off two-plus decades of redevelopment. Hudson Yards and the High Line in Manhattan, the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront and the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and Hunter’s Point South in Long Island City were all hatched under Doctoroff’s watch.
“We had something like 289 projects, and about 280 of them got done,” Doctoroff told the crowd. In the spirit of red-tape busting we need more of today, he added: “We really did everything we could to reduce bureaucratic inertia.”
In this parade of somewhat good news, it might even be (kind of) a good time for co-ops, which have gotten overshadowed for so long by the new condo towers rising in New York City. (Relative) bargains abound, and the expert buyers’ brokers who do deals in those buildings stand to benefit from the recent commission lawsuits that have rattled the industry.
Things aren’t as bright in South Florida, which bucked the national trend during Covid but now seems to be on the precipice when it comes to development.
The prospect of a bust seems real (remember, you heard it here first). South Florida saw record rent hikes from 2020 to 2022, but last year rent in the state dropped the most in the nation. There are more than 40,000 rental apartments under construction in South Florida, but only 11,000 units occupied in the latest 12-month period. Read the story by reporter Lidia Dinkova.
In our latest investigative piece, a mortgage fraud scam is exposing broader cracks in the system. The widening net now involves the Department of Justice; Freddie Mac; Fannie Mae; two of the largest title insurers in the tri-state area, Madison Title and Riverside Abstract; and Meridian Capital Group. Neither Meridian, Madison nor Riverside has been charged with any wrongdoing, but everyone is paying attention.
Finally, our cover story takes a look at the fallout from multifamily syndication deals, one of the hottest topics for our readers. There was a ton of investment in rental buildings during and after Covid — even if people didn’t go to the office, they still needed a place to live.
Turns out a bunch of the money came from newbie investors — doctors, dentists, pilots, immigrants, engineers and even church groups. Senior reporters Isabella Farr and Suzannah Cavanaugh reveal how these investors got sucked into bad deals that you won’t want to miss.
Let the good times roll! Enjoy the issue.