Is he the most prolific attorney in the city you’ve never heard about?
Probably not.
Still, it’s possible to lose track of just how many deals Fried Frank partner Meyer Last inked in 2011. Call it the Jon Mechanic effect. Read More
Speeches were casually ignored, drinks were spilled and bonds were formed at last Thursday’s 116th annual Real Estate Board of New York Gala, which this year drew an estimated 2,000 brokers, owners, advertising buyers and real estate reporters to the New York Hilton for an evening of conviviality, honorifics and hushed deal making. Among the fray was Commercial Observer staff writer Daniel Geiger, who during the course of the evening saw his stenopad tossed by an irate real estate broker and who unabashedly accosted Studley’s Woody Heller in the hotel’s bathroom, all for the sake of the story. Below, a timeline of gala comings and goings, from the innocuous gossip down to the downright obnoxious. Read More
A shakeup is at hand within the agency leasing team that handles the sizeable Manhattan office portfolio of the real estate investment company TF Cornerstone.
Matt Leon, a young and upcoming executive at the real estate services firm Newmark Knight Frank, will be taking over as head of the leasing team that represents TF Cornerstone’s collection of properties, which includes the midtown trophy building Carnegie Hall Tower, 645 Madison Avenue and 387 Park Avenue South. Read More
Behind every big real estate transaction is a phalanx of attorneys ticking off the billable hours. But in a slowly recovering market, with tepid lending and almost no new development, what exactly is the role of a real estate lawyer? Much more than dollar amounts are being negotiated, that’s for sure. And what differentiates one firm from the next?
We tapped the top New York City real estate practices and asked them these questions. Read More
It was back in 2006, during a streak of economic buoyancy, that Google, then only eight years old, paid $319 million for an office complex on Amphitheatre Avenue in Mountain View, Calif., that would soon become known to all as the Googleplex.
Since then, the empire that Larry Page and Sergey Brin built has expanded to include 68 addresses in Canada, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the United States and even the Middle East. In 2010, the company reported that its total assets had reached a whopping $57.9 billion. So it wasn’t a surprise last December when Google signed a contract to buy 111 Eighth Avenue, one of New York City’s largest office buildings. Nor did anyone blanch when the closing price of $1.8 billion turned out to be the largest of the year—not just in Manhattan, but in the entire country.
But for Robert Sorin, an attorney with Fried Frank’s real estate practice who represented Google in that deal, what remains most surprising of all is that an outfit that shares a tax bracket with the most profitable companies in the world wound up applying for a loan. Read More
Location: Why don’t you explain, in really simple language, what a distressed asset is? Aim low.
Mr. Levy: There are two basic types of distress. One [comes from a weakness in fundamentals], which is a weakness in the rent roll, weakness in the underlying credit of your tenants, decreasing [net operating Read More
When the city’s Economic Development Corporation earlier this month explained how it planned to spend the $205 million in taxpayer money that it had earmarked for Atlantic Yards, one purpose it did not mention was lobbying expenses. But opponents are now making hay of a report that shows that Forest City Read More
