By Daniel Geiger 3/01/12 4:34pm

Investment Sales 2012

Peter Hauspurg. (Illustration by Joao Maio Pinto)

Peter Hauspurg on Mastering the Middle

The investment sales market, most brokers agree, has been heating up over the past 12 months. Approximately $25.8 billion in commercial properties changed hands last year, a turnaround that represented an 88 percent increase over 2010. But while the positive uptick is easily verifiable, what happens next for Manhattan’s investment sales market is still up in the air.

Accordingly, The Commercial Observer set out to speak with the real estate industry’s most accomplished capital markets and sales practitioners to learn what’s in store for 2012. Over the next several days, we’ll post interviews with heavy hitters like Richard Baxter of Jones Lang LaSalle, J.D. Parker of Marcus & Millichap, Woody Heller of Studley and Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan of CBRE. But, first, after the jump, none other than Peter Hauspurg of Eastern Consolidated.

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By Daniel Edward Rosen 1/17/12 12:55pm

Commercial Observer

January 4, 2012 (8)

An Evening at the Liar’s Ball: Raucous Behavior! Bottles of Colgin at the 21 Club! Talking Over the Cardinal?

It was a typical evening at the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual gala as John Cardinal O’Connor stepped up to the dais to address a crowd of several thousand of the city’s most ambitious commercial real estate brokers and owners.

But in a ritual repeated more or less each year, the archbishop of the New York archdiocese’s 2.37 million Catholics and one of the Vatican’s most forceful spokesmen in the United States during the 1980s, was summarily ignored by a brokerage community far more interested in making deals than in hearing the Gospel. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 1/17/12 10:30am

Commercial Observer

Bernard Resnick, Sheldon Silver and Steven Spinola, circa 1996.

Reeling in the Years With the Real Estate Board of New York: In their own words, brokers and owners tell the tale of REBNY’s past half century

Since it started with a roll call of 27 members in 1896 with the goal of “facilitating transactions in real estate,” the Real Estate Board of New York has indisputably been the city’s most influential real estate organization, with its annual gala being to brokers what the Vanity Fair Oscar party is for Hollywood: If you’re there, it means you’re somebody.

Sure, some may lovingly write it off as a veritable men’s club (men are thought to outnumber women five to one), chide it as “The Liar’s Ball” (each year is a broker’s best year, no matter how wretched the marketplace) and speak ill of the food (nearly everyone avoids the chicken and filet mignon).

But the REBNY gala is as essential to a real estate person’s reputation and status as the buildings and bricks he works with. A dozen of the city’s most legendary players spoke to The Commercial Observer about the blurry nights and boom years that helped make the event what it is today.
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By Jotham Sederstrom 3/29/10 6:09pm

Wired

The Commercial Observer:

Last year, Eastern expanded its loan sales group. How has the response been?

Mr. Hauspurg: We actually started in 2005, which was a bit early, but we could see what was coming. The values were getting out of hand and we knew at some point the banks were going Read More

By Dana Rubinstein 2/03/09 7:09pm

The Consolidated Couple

Location: Eastern Consolidated really expanded and hit its stride during the economic doldrums of the 1990s. Do you see yourself expanding again in this downturn?

Ms. Paris: What happened is in ’89, we were, I think, 15 people. And we realized that we either had to get bigger or smaller or Read More