New York City attracts more commercial property investment than anywhere else in the world, a report from Cushman & Wakefield released last week revealed. Gotham beat out London as the hottest investment hub, an honor it has not held since 2007. Read More
Since departing Massey Knakal as one of its principals earlier this year, Shimon Shkury has been president of Ariel Property Advisors, where he has aggressively focused on Upper Manhattan properties. Mr. Shkury, 40, spoke to The Observer about the neighborhood’s umpteenth renaissance, an uptick in development sales and multifamily financing.
The Observer: You’re doing an enormous number of residential and mixed-use deals in Harlem. What’s drawing you to that particular neighborhood?
Mr. Shkury: In general, we’ve been doing a lot of work in our backyard, which is Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, in the multifamily arena mostly, but development as well. We’ve seen some uptick in activity in the past year, clearly in 2010 and the first half of this year. Read More
In last week’s column, we took a look at the overall New York City building sales market and compared its recent performance with past periods. This week, we will take a similar look at the first half of 2011 (1H11) but will analyze the performance of each individual geographic submarket.
As I have written for some time, we fully expected the Manhattan market to lead the entire marketplace out of the downturn and are indeed seeing this happen. Sales volume picked up in Manhattan before it did in other submarkets, and we are starting to see value appreciation in Manhattan.
In the outer boroughs (including northern Manhattan), sales volume has been lagging and, in some cases, has only recently started to recover. Read More
Regular columnist Michael Stoler on Verizon’s major sales the last few years.
While companies like Google are hungry to own commercial real estate in New York City, its competitor Verizon continues to sell off corporate real estate here. Read More
A five-story federal style townhouse in the West Village—which, incidentally, houses some of the luckiest rent-controlled tenants in the entire city—has sold for $6.5 million, brokers said. Read More
During the first half of 2011 (1H11), the dollar volume of investment sales transactions in the New York City market was $12.6 billion. On an annualized basis, activity is on pace to increase by 73 percent over the 2010 total of $14.6 billion.
At face value, this number leads to an extremely optimistic perspective regarding the market’s performance. However, Read More
The mixed-use residential and retail property, 220 Park Avenue South, near Gramercy Park and Union Square has sold for $20 million, brokers said. With a taking price of $595 per square foot, the turn-of-the-century, 33,638-square-foot building and its 37 rental units could be ripe for a condo conversion, said Peter Von Der Ahe of Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, which negotiated the sale. Read More
Eastern Consolidated recently released a report noting that New York office property trades have more than doubled during the second quarter to $4.3 billion, leading us to wonder if the investment-sales market, at least for office properties, really has come back.
But then we noticed something: Major firms with major deals on massive office towers dominate the list, with individual buys valued at hundreds of millions of dollars (which would contribute heftily to that $4.3 billion total). Not surprising, but it makes us wonder how the rest of the market is doing. Read More
As expected (we noted last week this would likely happen and soon), Lehman Brothers has agreed to unload its majority stake in the old Toy Building at 200 Fifth Avenue in a deal that values it at about $700 million. It is one of the biggest building sales of 2011 so far, and one of the most significant moves by the croaked investment bank’s holding company in its campaign to liquidate its real estate. The buyer is a wing of JPMorgan. Read More
When real estate executive David Sigman first walked into 25 Broad Street, about a year after Lehman collapsed, it was a funhouse of pre-2008 distractions: the lobby unfolded with yards of purple carpeting ringed by red circles into a would-be night club with dozens of crystal chandeliers and a mauve-color spa/yoga room. Most striking of all were the matching royal portraits of developer Kent Swig and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Liz Macklowe.
The Observer recently reported that the first 10 apartment tenants had signed at 25 Broad, bringing the failed condo conversion back to life as a rental—and Lehman Brothers, twitching, back with it.
Not even three years after the bank’s collapse took the economy with it, Lehman, through its holding company, lives on, a rosy zombie quietly looking to make a small fortune off prime New York properties, and maybe—just maybe—pay off some creditors. Read More
