It was a busy year for Mr. Baxter and his colleagues at Jones Lang LaSalle. His four-man team comprised some of the city’s most prominent brokers of large-scale commercial office buildings, and as the Manhattan sales market’s post-recessionary thaw continues, Mr. Baxter estimated that the group had tallied an impressive $1.3 billion in deals this year.

Three days before Christmas, however, it wasn’t one particular skyscraper Mr. Baxter was bargaining over from his plum seat at Casa Lever. In a year-end rush, his group had loose ends to tie up, deals to close and transactions still in the works. And so, on this particular Thursday amid a bustling lunch crowd, Mr. Baxter was not negotiating with a buyer or a building owner, but rather one of his own assistants, whom he was asking to stay late to receive critical documents and to help get the team through the rest of the day.

Richard Baxter. (Illustration by Joao Maio Pinto

“She was going to take the train to Boston,” said Mr. Baxter, after hanging up with his assistant. “But we just booked her a flight for later this evening.”

Such are the costs of deal making in the city, much like lunching in prime and pricey spots like Casa Lever. On the way in, Mr. Baxter, along with JLL colleagues Ron Cohen and Glenn Tolchin, stopped to chat with Jon Mechanic and Sush Torgalkar, who were having lunch at a nearby table. The conversation that ensued had all the easy chatter and laughs of old acquaintances catching up, yet it wasn’t difficult to imagine how casual encounters like this can spawn business. Mr. Mechanic is the city’s top transactional real estate attorney and Mr. Torgalkar is the chief operating officer of Westbrook Partners, an active buyer and seller with holdings that include boutique asset 444 Madison Avenue.

A natural networker with a sharp wit, Mr. Baxter seems readily able to take advantage of such opportunities. Having a grasp of the industry’s personalities is helpful in brokerage, allowing a level of insight beyond the facts and figures of a transaction. To hear him tell it, simmering disputes, hidden ambitions and other underlying factors can play as much of a role in sealing a deal as an investment’s rate of return or a building’s vacancy.

Settling into what he claimed was the real estate investor Aby Rosen’s usual booth, Mr. Baxter shifted conversation to the Seagram Building, the trophy tower that sits across Park Avenue from Lever House and, like Lever, is also owned by Mr. Rosen.

Years ago, Mr. Baxter was one of the brokers who sold a stake in the property to the billionaire investor Peter Brant. Earlier this year, Mr. Brant traded that interest at a huge profit to the Blackstone Group.

Rumors in the industry circulated that the sale had as much to do with Mr. Brant’s soured relationship with Mr. Rosen as it did cashing in the stake’s big returns. According to published reports, in fact, Mr. Rosen had allegedly made insulting comments about Mr. Brant’s wife, the former supermodel Stephanie Seymour.

“A woman’s scorn,” Mr. Baxter said, acknowledging with both amusement and marvel the dramatic sequence of events that may have led to the investment’s turnover.

In a more recent deal that Mr. Baxter wasn’t involved in but that also highlighted the hidden psychology underpinning the business, SL Green, among the city’s largest commercial landlords, was rumored to have snapped up the office building 10 East 53rd Street. SL Green has been one of the city’s most active acquirers of office buildings, specially through the downturn in the market when prices sagged from record highs. But the JLL team’s assessment of the deal was more penetrating than attributing it simply to SL Green’s voracious appetite.

SL Green had likely been disappointed at not getting 510 Madison Avenue, a nearby building that the firm nearly foreclosed on last year by buying up the property’s debt. The deal had slipped away from the firm when the rival REIT Boston Properties recapitalized the property, taking control. SL Green was paid handsomely, but 10 East 53rd Street was its way of restoring a bruised ego, picking up a boutique building that can potentially compete for the same kinds of tenants that 510 Madison Avenue attracts.

What is such insight worth in a deal? Perhaps not much. But if a broker’s job is to decide who is going to have the extra oomph to fully realize a property’s potential value, perhaps a lot.

“It is a matter of marketing and finding the buyer with the right vision for the asset,” Mr. Baxter said. “Directing the buyer towards maximizing the property’s true potential enables us to obtain premium pricing for our sellers. The five to ten percent premium wins the property. That is what our team does.”

Mr. Baxter and his team’s grasp of the industry’s players has paid off in the deals they have arranged in recent months. This year, the group sold both 737 Park Avenue and 150 East 72nd Street, for $360 million and $70 million respectively, to Harry Macklowe. Mr. Macklowe, once the prince of Manhattan’s real estate industry, took a precipitous and publicized fall during the recession. Though few doubted that Mr. Macklowe was still well-heeled enough to compete for major assets in the city, the acquisitions marked a surprising comeback and earned Mr. Baxter and his team accolades for identifying Mr. Macklowe as a buyer with resilience when many others had counted him out.

Mr. Baxter began his career during the early 1980s in sales brokerage at Newmark, where he and Mr. Cohen first became brokerage partners. The pair shifted to the Edward S. Gordon Company by the 1990s, at the time one of the city’s major real estate firms. ESG, as the firm’s name was abbreviated, eventually was acquired, first by Insignia, and later by the world’s biggest real estate services firm, CBRE.

CBRE, however, already had a powerful brokerage duo in place: Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan, who had a contractual right at the company to broker its deals in the city, said Mr. Baxter and Mr. Cohen. With a bustling business of their own, the pair proposed merging into a four-member group to defuse a potential rivalry and allow everyone to operate within Manhattan.

“It got complicated,” Mr. Baxter said about the talks then to join the teams, preferring not to go into the details of what those complications entailed.

Soon after, the pair ended up departing for Cushman & Wakefield, where they met Scott Latham and Jon Caplan, two sales executives at the firm. The two groups quickly merged and have been negotiating deals together ever since, although they have their specialties.

Mr. Cohen, for instance, has focused on recruiting foreign buyers and sellers into the team’s pipeline of contacts and deals, especially from Israel, where he is from and where investors have been active in the New York commercial real estate market in recent years. The four-man team’s time at C&W proved successful: In 2007, the group brokered the $1.8 billion sale of 666 Fifth Avenue, then the biggest commercial office sale in Manhattan, to the real estate investor, and Commercial Observer owner, Jared Kushner.

Last year, however, Mr. Baxter and his colleagues took a gamble, leaving Cushman for the rival brokerage firm Jones Lang LaSalle. The move, one of the biggest shakeups in the city’s investment sales industry in years, was a clear victory for JLL, whose lack of a competitive sales team was becoming increasingly conspicuous in the eyes of many real estate observers, not least of all those at the dominant brokerage firm CBRE.

For a time, the team seemed to lose ground to competitors like Ms. Stacom and Mr. Shanahan, who in 2010 appeared to re-energize the investment sales market by scoring a string of prominent sales, not least among them 340 Madison Avenue, 125 Park Avenue and 600 Lexington Avenue.

But Baxter and the team have regained ground. Aside from prominent deals like the pair of residential buildings the group sold to Mr. Macklowe, the team has sold smaller but still-lucrative assets, like 15 Little West 12th Street, which the group traded to investor Steve Elghanayan for $70 million in May. In June, they sold 70 Pine Street to Metro Loft for $205 million.

Heading into 2012, meanwhile, the group has even bigger deals in the pipeline. Indeed, the team will be hitting the market in the upcoming quarter with two prominent assets—one of them in Midtown, the other in Midtown South—that Mr. Baxter expects will trade for $600 million and $300 million respectively. “New York is a huge market and the way we look at it, there’s room enough for everyone,” Mr. Baxter said.

Mr. Baxter, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Tolchin were clearly in a hurry to leave Casa Lever. With so much to do, they had ordered a car to meet out front and shuttle them back to the office. By then, Mr. Mechanic and

Mr. Torgalkar had left, but in their place was Andrew Mathias, president of SL Green and the man in charge of overseeing acquisitions at the firm. Mr. Baxter and his team exchanged hellos and slid in to catch up.

The sense of urgency to leave was suddenly gone. The office could wait.

dgeiger@observer.com

Pricey. (City Review)

On Tuesday, The Observer reported Tony James had bought a duplex at 834 Fifth, that godly Upper East Side edifice. Perhaps it was a present to himself for how well The Blackstone Group, which he has run for the past few years alongside Steve Schwarzman, is now doing.The Times' Dealbook sort of says it all:

The Blackstone Group said Thursday that its profit more than tripled in the second quarter, bolstered once again by its huge real estate operations as the market for commercial property continued to improve.

How about that. Real estate begets real estate.

"The star performer in the quarter was real estate," Mr. James told The Journal, which also has more details of the stunning rebound for Blackstone's real estate holdings:

Blackstone's real-estate group, which manages nearly $28 billion and is led by Jonathan Gray and Chad Pike, has focused on buying distressed assets in the past few years. Blackstone recently teamed up with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG to bid for the roughly $9.5 billion U.S. real-estate portfolio of nationalized lender Anglo Irish Bank Corp.

The approach has paid off as commercial real-estate prices have firmed, especially in the office and hospitality market, even as residential housing remains weak. The value of Blackstone's real-estate holdings gained 6.7% in the quarter.

Blackstone recorded profits from real estate that rose to $453.5 million, from $121.4 million a year ago, helped by performance fees of $450.3 million, up from $37.4 million. Blackstone was helped because two of its real-estate funds have cleared the 8% "hurdle" rate of return, above which it can claim a 20% cut of returns.

On second thought, is that really so much money? When you think about it, that would only buy 18 of Mr. James' new homes, or, assuming it were on the market today and would probably fetch at least $50 million, only nine of Mr. Schwarzman's unheralded triplex at 740 Park. Frankly, we expect more.

In need of a wall-to-Waldorf renovation. (Getty)

The Waldorf-Astoria has lost some of its Jazz Age luster, growing rumpled and maybe even a little racist in old age. The hotel was purchased four years ago by Blackstone for $572 million, part of a $26 billion deal to buy up the Hilton chain. Now the monolithic investment outfit is prepared to spruce up the Walfdorf-Astoria, the Post reports.

According to the tab, Blackstone plans to spend "hundreds of millions of dollars" renovating the hotel, once home to mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano and jazz singer Cole Porter, as well as the eponymous salad. Speaking of, the Walldorf-Astoria's three restaurants—the Bull and Bear, Oscar's Brasserie and Peacock Alley—will be renovated, as well, but will not change.

Can you feel the excitement over this bygone beauty?

New York's interior design and architecture community, however, is already buzzing about the uber-renovation. Noted designer Alexandra Champalimaud will redo the interior, including the rooms and public spaces, sources said. Champalimaud declined an interview due to confidentiality agreements she signed.

Champalimaud's projects include the Pierre, the St. Regis in Beijing, as well as penthouses at the Dorchester, London. Architectural firm Brennan Beer Gorman may also be involved, sources added.

Call it the Uber Astoria.

The real estate folks at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch are finally making some decisions (though not the decision we’ve all been waiting for).

Bank of America has renewed its lease for 114,000 square feet at 717 Fifth Avenue. The news was first reported Monday on Observer.com.

The former Merrill sales office will remain at the slinky skyscraper, once owned by Sam Zell's Equity Office and now controlled by Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone, until at least 2014. Taking rents on the lease were not revealed, but 717 Fifth, during the boom, commanded rents of well over $100 a square foot. Given the economy and the tenants’ market Manhattan has become, it’s likely this lease was for much less.

“Essentially, that’s been the flagship New York store,” said Kelly Cishek, a spokeswoman for Bank of America. “We’ve been serving clients in that location in midtown for 20 years. We wanted to maintain our presence, maintain that history, and continue to serve our clients in midtown.”

Why the renewal for only five years? Ms. Cishek attributed it to the uncertainties inherent in the massive integration of Merrill Lynch into Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America. Good luck, y’all.

Peter Riguardi, president of New York operations at Jones Lang LaSalle, represented the bank in negotiations with Robert Alexander, chairman of CB Richard Ellis’ tristate region, who represented the landlord.

drubinstein@observer.com

"This all started several months ago when the FT brought to our attention the multiple uses of a single password in our London office," a source at the Blackstone Group's New York office told the Daily Transom. "We started negotiations with FT about how much we owe them for this, but then they just filed a lawsuit!"

We're told that the New York office actually has 63 paid subscriptions, and the senior-level individual blamed for the misuse by the court papers filed by FT was not Mr. Schwartzman. 

"It's just untrue that senior people were involved," said the Blackstone source. "This was a junior guy in our London office. New York office had nothing to with it."

Mr. Schwarzman is worth about $6.4 billion (according to Forbes), and the Blackstone Group reported revenue of over $3 billion in fiscal year 2007. But it seems that the asset management company didn't have enough cash to purchase individual FT user accounts, at $179 per year, for its employees. Instead, employees were encouraged to search for articles under one established account--user name: theblackstonegroup, password: blackstone. (The account has since been de-activated.)  

Apparently, officials at the newspaper became suspicious when the Blackstone account was accessing thousands of articles per day. To make matters worse, it had been going on since 2002! (The Blackstone Group can't even blame their misdoings on the financial crisis.) But it leads one to wonder why the FT never went the way of the Wall Street Journal, which only allows one computer to be logged in under one username at a time. (We know from experience.)

From the court documents: 

The papers do not specify how much FT is seeking in damages from the Blackstone Group. 

Indeed he is. According to a very delicious real estate gossip site called Big Time Listings, the buyer is Blackstone senior vice president Chu Chinh, a maestro of the corporate equity biz. He'll have the tower's 89th floor to himself, plus half of the 90th.

Three years ago, Mr. Chu had half an hour to save Blackstone’s two-year takeover of a chemical maker called Celanese. It took a few sweaty phone calls for Mr. Chu to pull off the $3.8 billion deal, the largest public-to-private buyout ever in Europe-- which is why he gets to own a Trump duplex penthouse with 34 rooms, 14,864 square feet, 12 bedrooms and 16.5 bathrooms.

But, sadly, that all amounts to just one and a half floors at the top of Trump World Tower! Mr. Chu tried to buy out the neighbor that shares the 90th floor, two sources told The Observer on Monday, but his efforts to claim the apartment failed. He’ll have to make due with his 16 (and a half) bathrooms.

Mr. Geffen

But there was no mention of who had bought the nine-room American Thread Building duplex. According to city records, the lucky guy is Lawrence Guffey, a senior managing director of the monolithic Blackstone Group.

On the sales deed, Dreamworks mogul David Geffen happens to be listed as one of Ms. Klein's trustees. Maybe Mr. Geffen and Mr. Guffey are friends: the exec "leads Blackstone's media and communications investment activities." Reached through his office, Guffey had no comment.

Click here or here to read about his colleagues' Manhattan homes.

- Max Abelson

Equity's board approved on Sunday night the buyout by Blackstone, which includes the assumption of debt. But Equity's shareholders still have to sign off on the deal, a reality that could hold everything up, as SL Green and Reckson know well.

- Tom Acitelli

According to the deed, he paid $7 million for the 5,800-square-foot apartment, $495,000 less than the latest asking price.

Marvin and Susan Numeroff, who bought the place from Mr. Waksal for $6.5 million in May of 2004 were the sellers. The apartment had been on and off the market since that purchase.

A source close to this deal said it was complicated by the ImClone boss’ murky legacy. “A lot of his work was done illegally,” said the source. “Every time you’ve had bad things done to an apartment, you inherit them.”

That skullduggery includes a secret passageway.

“There was an illegal staircase installed that went up to the roof terrace,” the source said. “According to code, it was completely out of whack, so it had to be sealed off behind Sheetrock. You couldn’t even see it.”

Listing broker Pat Dugan was more upbeat about the triplex’s history and its perks, like a kitchen “with a balcony overlooking it.”

A balcony?

“There was an opening that was created on the stairs that led up to the top floor,” he said. “It was like a window, really. I guess Waksal did it.”

Despite Mr. Waksal’s apparent fondness for renovation, the Numeroffs had even bigger plans.

“Supposedly, they had literally wanted to tear the whole thing down, and to build it all from scratch,” said our source on the deal. “The board declined. They didn’t want to live with a three-year renovation.”

The buyer’s broker was Leonard Steinberg, who would not comment for this story. And Mr. Agarwal, who runs real-estate-related advisory services for Blackstone, did not return calls to his office.

(As luck would have it, Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson briefly served on ImClone’s board.)

Mr. Agarwal’s new penthouse has a private foyer that leads into a 47-and-a-half-foot-long living room, which eventually leads into a master bedroom with cherry-wood closets, four skylights, a terrace and a steam shower.

The Numeroffs are leaving all that behind for a mid-19th-century brownstone on West 23rd, which they bought in August for $4,975,000.

The octogenarian Mr. Numeroff was the president of Brooklyn’s Universal Diagnostic Laboratories, which folded this year. Back in 1988, he and his firm were accused of dumping blood vials contaminated with hepatitis B. (The incriminating trash bags, found in Flatbush, also had urine and sperm samples, loose needles, plus a scalpel.)

Mr. Numeroff was reportedly arrested and charged with misdemeanors.

Mr. Waksal didn’t get off so easily: After pleading guilty to insider trading, securities fraud and tax evasion, he was sentenced in June 2003 to an 87-month sentence at the federal Otisville Correctional Facility.

There are probably no steam showers in Otisville. But he can hope for a secret stairway.

Sheila Johnson in Suite Deal At St. Regis: $1.44 M.

Sheila Crump Johnson, founder of the BET television network, has bought a deluxe suite in the St. Regis Hotel for just above $1.44 million.

The 523-square-foot palace, which was first listed for $2.118 million, is one of the 24 residences being sold at the Fifth Avenue landmark.

Ms. Johnson’s apartment is essentially just a bedroom, but what a bedroom it is!

According to a sales booklet, there’s a “silk-draped king bed,” plus “fabrics in muted shades of silver-pale green and steel blue,” chosen by the celebrated interior designer firm Sills Huniford.

The St. Regis pad also has a custom-built hideaway flat-screen television, plus a TV in the marble bathroom.

Appropriately, each apartment comes with a butler’s pantry, plus a five-fixture bath.

Despite those attractions, it’s not likely that Ms. Johnson will be spending much time in the hotel.

For one thing, Ms. Johnson, the first African-American woman to become a billionaire, owns a century-old Virginia estate named Salamander Farm.

For another, the St. Regis residential-use plan limits owners to only 182 days in their apartments.

Ms. Johnson could not be reached at her office. Likewise, representatives of the internal St. Regis listing broker, SVO Residents Club, would not comment. Corcoran’s Sunshine Group began marketing the hotel’s 24 residences (plus 22 fractional units) this February, though SVO took over six months later.

According to the Manhattan database RealPlus, 15 of the 24 residences are still on the market.

Rockstar-Wrangler Ankles Flatiron

Rock ’n’ roll manager extraordinaire Merck Mercuriadis has flipped his block-spanning loft at Fifth Avenue and 17th Street.

City records list the buyer as Ian Peck and the selling price as $4.366 million.

Mr. Mercuriadis and his wife Susan paid $4 million for the apartment only last year. But Union Square life didn’t suit the father of four—who manages Elton John, Guns N’ Roses and the pompadoured pop genius Morrissey.

What was wrong with the 6,000-square-foot place? He complained that his kids could slip out the building’s 18th Street backdoor before family dinnertime.

The solution: “We’ve moved to Los Angeles, where you can have a little more control of your children. Everything is driving distance.”

But there was a more romantic rationale for what Mr. Mercuriadis calls his disconnection from the apartment. He had pined to build a glassed soundproof music room for his 100,000 albums, but zoning laws got in the way.

“Music is always on in the house. And it’s always on at volume,” he explained. “Ultimately, the loft space wasn’t conducive to that.”

Why? “With four children, you’ve got four TV’s going on at any one time.”

As recompense, the full-floor loft has a chef’s kitchen with commercial appliances, north and west views, plus oversized windows facing south.

Along with his migration to California, Mr. Mercuriadis is reportedly leaving his job at the Sanctuary management group. But he promised that Guns N’ Roses’ legendarily long-awaited album will be out by Christmas.

His broker, Tom Wexler, didn’t return calls to his office, and Mr. Peck could not be reached.

E*Trade Founder Sells for $6.05 M.

E*Trade founder William Porter has sold his three-bedroom apartment at the bullion-colored Trump International to filmmaker Dounia Benjelloun.

According to city records, she paid $6.05 million for Mr. Porter’s condo, the second in the building for the daughter of big-time Moroccan banker Othman Benjelloun.

Trump broker Susan James wouldn’t comment on the deal, though the original listing describes a marble-floored entry foyer and crown molding throughout the 2,165-square-foot apartment.

Mr. Porter couldn’t be reached through E*Trade (which he founded in 1992) or through his newer firm International Securities Exchange.

But according to the I.S.E. Web site, Mr. Porter is a rabid inventor: Among other things, he patented the “first shoulder-mounted backpack broadcast color TV camera.”

The listing described his apartment as “tastefully decorated with contemporary furnishings in earth tone palette.” Quite a contrast to the very un-earthy aesthetics of Trump International, which Philip Johnson helped convert into a turgidly posh hotel and condo in the 90’s.

Ms. Benjelloun’s new 29th-floor apartment has lofty city and park views—loftier than the views from her old apartment on the 23rd floor.

“That’s what I like—the light and the Central Park view,” she said. “In [the old] one I had a corner view. It was good, but now I’m right in front of the park.”

City records show that she bought her first apartment in the building in 1999, which is also when the Porters bought their apartment. On the sales deed, the Porters’ address is listed in Portola, Calif.