Richard Bernstein

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

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 10/18/11 9:39am

Lease of the Week

Aegis Media and its brokers negotiated a renewal, with perks.

The negotiations behind Aegis Media’s renewal and renovation deal at 150 East 42nd Street

It was a dramatic growth spurt that prompted Aegis Media to reconsider its commercial real estate options in New York 18 months ago. But it was a commitment by the group’s landlord that ultimately convinced the London-based digital media company to renew its lease at 150 East 42nd Street. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 8/16/11 9:12am

power broker

Mr. Bernstein joined Colliers ABR, the precursor to Cassidy Turley, in 2007.

The Accidental Journeyman

When it was announced in early 2007 that the Empire State Building would undertake an ambitious, $550 million renovation—the first of such grandeur since it was erected 76 years earlier—real estate observers stood divided on whether the effort was long overdue or, considering the looming economic crises, an unnecessarily expensive bet.

Given the 102-story tower’s 2.5 million square feet—not to mention its aging infrastructure, elevators and lobby—naysayers had reason to doubt the logic behind such a costly affair. Add to those challenges a mandate to replace the building’s jigsaw puzzle of 550 fractious users with a collection of far more prestigious, full-floor tenants and the endeavor seemed positively Sisyphean to some. Read More

By Mike Taylor 11/23/10 1:10pm

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: A Novel Approach to Insider Trading

Someone at the Securities and Exchange Commission had the bright idea to stop targeting specific insider trades and instead try to bring down entire communities of Wall Street lawbreakers. This notion has been at play in last year’s massive Galleon case and also yesterday’s government raids on three big hedge funds. [Read More

By Dana Rubinstein 12/10/08 12:37am

Asking Rents Agonistes

Maybe it’s too soon to declare the death of the Manhattan office-space asking rent. But, at the very least, the downward-spiraling economy and the lack of completed deals have rendered the asking rent—that symbol of landlord volition and market domination—an endangered species.

Where once a tenant broker could simply access CoStar to ascertain how Read More

By Frank DiGiacomo 11/04/02 12:00am