The West Village, 1999. The meatpackers have all but left the nearby cobblestones, but a savvy buyer can still pick up a sprawling, newly-converted industrial loft for a little over a million bucks.
Enter Steve Roth, chairman of megadeveloper Vornado, who knows a real estate deal when he sees one and is renowned for waiting out the market until the time is right to sell. Read More
Penson, a financial services company, has expanded and renewed its lease at 1 Penn Plaza, the company’s brokers have told The Commercial Observer.
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He’s the Cassandra of the construction industry, the rabble-rouser of rubble.
Attorney Barry LePatner, founder of LePatner & Associates LLP and author of construction shock books Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward and Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, has his own 30,000-foot-high view looking down on the current state of New York City’s construction industry. He believes there will be a $25 trillion construction boom in New York and the rest of the country between now and the year 2035. Read More
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has entered into an agreement to acquire the building at 33 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan,” a New York Fed spokesperson confirmed in a prepared statement issued yesterday afternoon to The Commercial Observer. “The Bank is now in a final due diligence phase prior to the expected closing in the first quarter.” Read More
All that agita for nothing.
After fighting the bullish Steve Rothto save the Empire State Building’s spot on the skyline, Tony Malkin has won a reprieve—thanks to the miserable economy. Read More
Jonathan Gray, Blackstone’s wizard of real estate, has spent billions buying up distressed assets during the downturn, including his brand-new bid for some of Bank of America’s buildings. Still, the deal that has defined his career so far has to be Blackstone’s purchase of Sam Zell’s Equity Office Properties. Not only was the 2007 acquisition of 563 office properties the largest leveraged buyout of all time, at $39 billion, but it also pit Mr. Gray against one of the shrewdest men in real estate, Vornado’s Steve Roth. The bullish Mr. Roth is still stinging from the loss. Read More
Sunday came and went, and still there is no deal for Vornado’s Port Authority Bus Terminal tower. It has been a dozen years since Vornado was tapped to build the thing, and while the developer was poised to get to work in 2007, those plans collapsed along with the economy. The deal was set to expire this weekend, but the Port Authority has granted Vornado yet another extension to come up with a plan to make both sides happy. Read More
It has now taken Steve Roth a dozen years and almost as many extensions to keep his plans for a tower atop the Port Authority Bus Terminal alive. But with a deadline approaching Sunday to finalize a deal, The Journal reports that Vornado and the Port Authority are still far from a terminal tower agreement. Read More
From his perch onstage at the Pierre Hotel last Thursday, Bill Ackman looked down his nose on REITs.
“You can make more money on a single real estate deal than as a REIT,” he said at the 16th annual REIT symposium hosted by the N.Y.U. Schack Institute. Mr. Ackman, who made at least some of Read More
Across the city, hundreds of hammers are poised midair. Many believe that development will be frozen for years to come. But while the sight of New York City’s 600 stalled construction projects is difficult to ignore, those deep inside the industry say signs of a new boom are beginning to appear.
“It seems that there’s Read More
