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• March 2024 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Office values are down 25% year-over-year through December. With the rise of remote working and other economic conditions, there’s no guarantee those values will ever reach previous levels again. Office owners are showing more willingness to sell properties at a discount. As declining occupancy rates and higher interest rates have driven down values on buildings, some of which were bought at previous market cycle peaks. High interest rates have discouraged dealmakers, while office values have fallen by billions (maybe trillions) of dollars thanks to remote work. Peel back a few layers and things might not be quite so dire, ...
  
  
• March 2024 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: The real estate arm of insurer MassMutual put the 29-story 100 Wall Street up for sale, eyeing a figure of about $125 million That’s nearly $150 million less than Barings, through its subsidiary Cornerstone Real Estate Advisors, paid for the tower in 2015. Buildings Sold: Jeffrey Wu is selling 41-60 Main Street in Flushing, Queens for $80 million to Madison Realty Capital. The 100,000-square-foot office and retail building is located in Downtown Flushing. An entity connected to the Holiday Inn Club, 501 Lexington Development LLC, paid $30.3 million. Sold by Timeshare Acquisitions At Lexington LLC, purchased the ...
  
  
• February 2024 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Retail: Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse renewal for 25,000 SF restaurant at 1121 Sixth Avenue. Madewell signed a 10-year lease to consolidate its two Brooklyn stores along North 6th Street in Williamsburg for 8,300 sf. Barnea Bistro signed a 15-year lease at 114 West 47th Street in Times Square for 7,602 sf. Max Deals, the home goods retailer, signed a 20-year lease at the base of a new residential construction located at 1049 Ogden Avenue in Highbridge for 5,800 sf. TFogo de Chão, the Brazilian steakhouse, signed a new lease in the Oculus mall at 3 World Trade Center in ...
  
  
• February 2024 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the parent company of Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and jewelry designer Tiffany & Co., is in negotiations to acquire 745 Fifth Avenue, a 35-story tower. LVMH is competing against other bidders for the property. SL Green acquired 2 Herald Square leasehold for next to nothing; it had completed a deal to acquire a 95% stake in the leasehold at 2 Herald Square: SL Green paid $7 million to settle the property’s $182.5 million mortgage. The City Comptroller is suing Lloyd Goldman’s development company over allegations that it failed to pay the wages required ...
  
  
• February 2024 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: The defaulted loan on Blackstone's 1740 Broadway is for sale after a $430 million drop in value. The $308 million CMBS loan on 1740 Broadway is on the market for roughly $150 million. Albert Kalimian’s firm put the property at 200 West 67th Street up for sale. Kalimian had defaulted on the $194 million mortgage which matured in November. The 310-unit luxury property rental income covered 87% of borrowing costs. Rialto Capital is suing Metropole on behalf of the lenders for failing to make $215 million CMBS loan payments on 681 Fifth Avenue, a 12-story building since ...
  
  
• January 2024 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison leased 765,000 sf at 1345 Sixth Avenue for 20-years. WeWork and the landlord agreed to modify its lease for a shorter term at a lower rent to keep its 300,000 SF lease at 1440 Broadway. HPS Investment Partners’ signed a renewal and expansion for 159,000 SF at 40 W. 57th Street. Verizon recently listed 143,000 square feet for sublease at 155 Delancey Street. Ralph Lauren signed an 11-year renewal for 133,000 SF headquarters at 650 Madison Avenue, shrinking its footprint by 39%. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan signed a 132,000 SF lease at ...
  
  
• January 2024 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the LLC Transparency Act but made a critical change to keep information on limited liability companies out of public view. The owners behind these entities will have to disclose their names and business addresses to the state government, which will keep it confidential. The governor signed a bill that expands the definition of fraud in rent overcharge cases. Governor Hochul unveiled plans for more than 2,800 homes in Queens. The governor will tap industry to revamp 58 acres of underutilized land at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. 1,633 homes will be for sale, as two-story homes ...
  
  
• December 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The U.S. Immigration Fund of a 22-acre megaproject that was supposed to deliver more than 3,000 units of housing in Brooklyn is at risk of losing control of several still-unbuilt development sites. to foreclose on six sites owned by Greenland USA. Steve Cohen details his Queens casino plan dba Metropolitan Park would be an 8 billion project near Citi Field and spread over 50 acres of parking lots surrounding Citi Field, home to the Mets. Hard Rock International is partnering with Cohen on the project. Cohen’s plan includes a hotel, music venue, food hall and 20 acres of ...
  
  
• November 2023 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Office leasing in activity jumped 26% from the second quarter to the third. But much of that was upheld by two large leases and availability remained at record highs. Finding office tenants has been a slog for Manhattan landlords. Midtown and Midtown South have improved as “flight to quality” companies upgrading to better Class A space. Midtown South’s availability hit a new all-time high with an 18.6% jump. One of New York City’s prominent real estate law firms is going out of business, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. Their demise is a blow to New York’s real estate industry. ...
  
  
• October 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The Adams administration laid out a framework to change the area’s light manufacturing zoning to allow for higher density residential and commercial use. The rezoning is expected to create between 1,150 and 1,500 below market–rate apartments, depending on the options developers select under the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing law. NY City's plan to rezone a 13-block stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn would spur the construction of 4,000 apartments, up to 38 % affordable. The projects would have to deliver affordable units and other benefits required by the new zoning. Other rezonings in the works include a 46-block area ...
  
  
• September 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Blackstone and Hudson Pacific Properties are joining with Vornado to build a new film studio on Manhattan’s West Side. Dubbed Sunset Pier 94 Studios, the project would be developed as a public-private partnership with New York City Economic Development Corp. The total investment from the three publicly traded firms will be about $350 million. The campus would span 266,000 SF with six soundstages. The development would feature a 1,850 SF amenity space, 25,000 SF of waterfront open space. Vornado has the long-term leasehold on Pier 94 and is providing the lease to the joint venture, in which it ...
  
  
• August 2023 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Landlords usually ask tenants to show proof that they are in good financial standing and can be expected to pay rent every month. Tenants are now asking landlords to open up their books and provide protection in case they go under. Tenants are taking a closer look at the capital stack of buildings and considering the exact implications of a landlord defaulting on their obligations. Distress in U.S. office real estate jumped to $24.8B at the end of the second quarter, up $6.7B from the previous three-month period. Office is now the most distressed commercial real estate asset type ...
  
  
• August 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The value of commercial and multifamily construction declined by 31% year-over-year from January through June. 5 World Trade Center will be the first residential building at the World Trade Center. Gov. Kathy Hochul approved a deal to include 400 income-restricted apartments as part of a 1,200-unit tower. Margaritaville lenders go after El-Gamal and partners for $86 million debt after they triggered a bad boy guarantee by throwing the project into bankruptcy, and the investors are personally on the hook for $86 million in debt. El-Gamal and his partners, Flintlock Construction Services’ Andrew and Stephen Weiss, became personally liable ...
  
  
• July 2023 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Microsoft is subleasing more than 42,000 square feet. Savanna exits 110 William Street as Pacific Oak restructures and the city agency takes 640,000 sf. The 20-year deal accounts for more than two-thirds of the entire footprint of the 32-story, 930,000-square-foot building. The tenant news comes as the owners reached an agreement with Invesco Real Estate to restructure more than $334 million in debt. Savanna will transfer its 40% ownership stake to Pacific Oak, . Pacific Oak would then invest between $110 million and $130 million of equity for tenant improvements. An existing $85.7 million mezzanine debt would be converted ...
  
  
• June 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Hennepin County wrongfully pocketed the excess proceeds from the sale of Geraldine Tyler’s condo unit. Tyler owed the county $15,000, a sum that ballooned from $2,311 in unpaid property taxes. To settle the debt, the county sold her condo unit for $40,000 and kept all of it. The court agreed that this violated the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, reversing the Eighth Circuit’s decision in the county’s favor. NYC’s lien sale, debt from overdue taxes, water bills and the like is sold to an investment trust that can foreclose on the property ...
  
  
• June 2023 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Premier Equities bought the hotel at 1141 Broadway in 2019, and is seeking around $60 million for the 10-story NoMad property. Three Nolita Veracity Equities are slated for a foreclosure auction as the firm struggles to repay a $41 million loan. 31 Prince Street, 46 Spring Street and 48 Spring Street are now more than 121 days delinquent. Appraised value has dropped from $66 million when the loan was issued in March 2018 to $49.5 million. All the properties are walk ups and have a combined 48 residential units, only six of which are rent-regulated and eight ...
  
  
• May 2023 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan Retail Market: Burberry rented a short term lease at 693 Fifth Avenue. This means the cash flow from the property is short of revenue to cover its $250 million loan. Burberry took 14,000 square feet of retail space, 15% of the property at 693 Fifth, paying just $372 annually per square foot, a third of the $1,144 that Valentino agreed to pay when it inked a 15-year lease in 2013. David’s Bridal layoffs target 14 New York stores including three locations in New York City: including 45 West 25th Street in Manhattan, Plaza 48 at 3460 48th Street in ...
  
  
• May 2023 New York New Developments
• New Developments: The MTA launched eminent domain proceedings for nine sites in East Harlem. The MTA plans on demolishing existing buildings to make room for some heavy machinery to extend the subway from East 96th Street to East 125th Street. The staging ground at East 116th Street will ultimately become a subway entrance for the extension. A collapsed Lower Manhattan parking garage had open violations. The Manhattan DA is investigating the incident that killed one. The partially collapsed building at 57 Ann Street racked up dozens of violations for decades. Four of those violations remained open when the building, owned ...
  
  
• April 2023 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Twitter listed 200,000 square feet of space up for sublease at its Chelsea offices. The connected buildings at 245 West 17th Street and 249 West 17th Street. Touro University at 3 Times Square adding 66K sf across two more floors bringing, total footprint in the tower to nearly 310,000 square feet. STV leased 65,000 square feet at 350 Fifth Avenue and will occupy the full 10th and part of the 11th floor. Asking rent for the 16-year lease was $69 per square foot. StubHub leased 3 World Trade Center and signed a 44,000-square-foot lease on the 59th floor of ...
  
  
• April 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Gov. Kathy Hochul dismissed doubts around Penn Station’s redevelopment and expansion, as the plan appears to be in trouble. The development is expected to yield 18 million square feet of commercial space and around 1,200 apartments. Vornado controls five of the eight development sites. State authorities approved a plan to partially pay for the redevelopment of the transit station, estimating that payments in lieu of taxes from private development could generate up to $3.75 billion for the project. The donut and coffee chain last year led the city in ubiquity again with 620 storefronts, five more than the ...
  
  
• April 2023 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: 115 Seventh Avenue could sell for half the amount when Argentic Investment Management took control of the seven-story building at Seventh Avenue and 17th Street, hoping to get around $30 million. Gregg Singer is fighting Madison Realty Capital’s attempt to foreclose on the old P.S. 64 site and put the entity into bankruptcy protection a day before a foreclosure auction. Giving Singer one last shot at selling the property or refinancing the debt on it. JDS Development and the retail piece of 9 DeKalb Ave will hold onto condos. JDS Development has listed the 398-unit rental apartments ...
  
  
• March 2023 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Related Companies’ fund management arm and BentallGreenOak are ready to walk away from the Point LIC, a small campus of converted warehouses in Long Island City, that sit mostly vacant after six years. BrightSpire Capital is looking to sell the non-performing loans, and the borrowers have agreed to hand the keys to the Point over to whoever buys the debt through a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure. The mortgages on the two buildings total around $150 million. The two properties: a 130,000-square-foot former oil storage warehouse at 2100 49th Avenue, dubbed the Paragon Building, and a 220,000-square-foot building across ...
  
  
• February 2023 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: The amount of available office space has increased almost 70% since the onset of the pandemic to 91.4 million square feet. After 2.8 million square feet of negative net absorption in the fourth quarter, net absorption since the start of the pandemic now stands at negative 37.6 million square feet. Asking rents for Class A space in Manhattan averaged $81.51 per square foot in the fourth quarter, up slightly from a year ago. Net effective rents are down after factoring in concessions. Tenants in the TAMI are increasingly upgrading to newer spaces. While 37% of companies in those fields ...
  
  
• February 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Mayor Adams proposes Manhattan rezoning of Midtown to allow conversions of offices to residential construction in areas that only permit manufacturing and office use. West 23rd to West 41st streets is zoned for manufacturing, which prevents ground-up residential development and conversions of vacant office space for residential use. Office conversions could lead to 20,000 new apartments but would require changes to the Multiple Dwelling Law, including lifting the cap on the city’s residential floor area ratio. Citadel is eyeing a 51-story, Norman Foster-deleased tower at 350 Park Avenue, where it will redevelop properties leased from Vornado Realty Trust ...
  
  
• February 2023 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Chetrit to pay off the floating-rate loan $481 million. The Chetrit Group is facing default on a $481 million loan, covering 43 properties that the developer is now looking to sell. APF Properties is looking to sell its plot at 24 West 57th Street, for north of $80 million. As a development site, the property holds about 140,000 square feet of buildable space as of right. Maverick sues Chetrit over unfinished Penn Station hotel. Lender alleged the developer neglected matured loans, didn’t complete the project. Maverick Real Estate Partners sued for the second time going after the ...
  
  
• January 2023 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The Mayor and the Governor laid out initiatives to future-proof New York, including 40 proposals aimed at increasing the housing supply and making business districts more attractive. The city and state will push to increase mass transit options and housing around employment hubs to cut commute times. Other proposals include removing the cap on the residential floor area ratio as well as allowing accessory dwelling units. New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program will finally shutter Jan. 15. ERAP provided eviction protection despite running out of rent aid, resulting from a lawsuit settlement Non paying tenants to delay eviction ...
  
  
• January 2023 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Quarters into bankruptcy, the co-living firm’s flagship property in Williamsburg has hit the market. Developer David D. Dweck is looking to sell the 160-bedroom, 62,600-square-foot campus on North 6th Street between Bedford and Driggs Avenues for $65 million. Fred Ohebshalom is under pressure from Stillwater Asset Management who is looking to foreclose on the nine-story office building at 226 East 54th Street after purchasing the building’s debt. 180 Nassau Street is facing foreclosure after Pink Stone allegedly failed to service the debt 103-unit apartment building. Ezra Unger is once again facing foreclosure at 427 Marcy Avenue as ...
  
  
• December 2022 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Jay Suites signed a 60,000-square-foot lease in Chelsea at 159 West 25th Street at $30 per square foot. WeWork will close another 40 locations, or about 41,000 desks. 71% of WeWork’s locations are occupied. David Zwirner Gallery signed a 36,000-square-foot lease at 520 West 20th Street. Retail: Annual rents for Upper Fifth Avenue stores averaged $2,000 per square foot, up 14% from pre-pandemic levels. and remain 6% below pre-pandemic levels. Retail availability dropped nearly a full percentage point year-over-year to 5% last quarter. It was the lowest level of availability. New York City is pushing for even more shopping ...
  
  
• December 2022 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Silverstein Properties, BedRock Real Estate Partners and Kaufman Astoria Studios have come to terms with the City Council for approval of a controversial megadevelopment in Queens. The $2 billion Innovation QNS will bring about 3,200 apartments to Astoria, 45% of them affordable. The agreement calls for 1,436 affordable units including 500 for households earning 30% of the area median income and 157 for homeless people. Related Companies and Sterling Equities will develop a 25,000-seat soccer stadium for the New York City Football Club at Citi Field and is expected to arrive by 2027 for the NYCFC squad. The ...
  
  
• December 2022 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Kushner has listed 18 buildings with more than 325 units in Greenwich and East Village for sale, about a third of the firm’s multifamily portfolio in Manhattan. One is a group of 11 buildings in the East Village with 197 units. There are seven buildings in the East Village and West Village with 129 units. An entire building is for sale for $50 million. The 38-unit co-op at 38 Gramercy Park North, keys to the park included, spans 21,400 square feet and comes with 9,750 square feet of additional development rights. Sale could result in luxury condo ...
  
  
• November 2022 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Related Companies is planning a 1.3 million-square-foot office project at 514 West 36th Street. The property, also known as 517 West 35th Street, was at one time part of a 1.4 million-square-foot, mixed-use project. SL Green and Caesars Entertainment have teamed up to bring a proposed Caesars Palace to 1515 Broadway, even though they have encountered opposition. The DoubleTree’s rooms are among thousands that remain vacant as hotels that never reopened. 46 New York properties with more than 10,400 rooms still remain closed. Industrial real estate demand is cooling after leasing 150 million square feet of warehouse space ...
  
  
• October 2022 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: September office occupancy numbers may represent a new normal. As more companies are settling into a wide range of work policies, from full-time, never or somewhere in between. The pandemic-induced drop in office use is projected to have a devastating effect on the market. The city’s office buildings will fall in value by 28%, or $49 billion. The stretch along Third Avenue from 42nd Street to 59th Street is becoming a stark example of the downside to the city’s ongoing flight to quality. The city’s office vacancy rate is at 19%, it is 29% on the 17-block corridor, nearly ...
  
  
• October 2022 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Aman Group is looking to sell the hotel portion at the f Crown Building. One person familiar with the matter said the hotel could fetch $600 million. The deal would be structured with a manage-back clause, retaining Aman as operator of the property. UBS seeks $125M for UES apartment tower 408 East 92nd Street for somewhere between $120 million and $125 million, Developed in 2004, the building has an affordability agreement, set to expire in 2026, that subjects 20 percent of its 196 units to rent stabilization in exchange for the 421a property tax abatement. Madison Realty ...
  
  
• August 2022 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Steve Witkoff and Ian Schrager have defaulted on their Public Hotel on the Lower East Side. The developers defaulted on their $189 million mortgage backing the 367-room hotel at 215 Chrystie Street, and are now paying a 9% penalty interest rate. Their lender, Deutsche Bank, is looking to sell the non-performing loan. Aby Rosen has put the Church Missions House for sale at $135 million, or about $3,000 per square foot. It is a six-story, 45,000-square-foot office property located at 281 Park Avenue South. Thor Equities is still trying to sell a Lenox Hill townhouse after 10 ...
  
  
• July 2022 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: An analysis predicted that by 2029, the city’s office stock will drop in value by 28%, or roughly $49 billion, due to lease revenue falling and remote work rising further. Office value declines could cost the city $600 million in annual property tax revenue. The city’s office market has a vacancy rate of 16%, while the sublease vacancy rate is 5%; both are higher than they were during recent economic crises. The widespread increase in permanent hybrid work situations spurred a recent lift in the sublease market. Sublease space available in Manhattan was more than 20.2 million square feet, ...
  
  
• July 2022 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The state advanced the $7 billion redesign of Penn Station, The state will begin accepting bids from architecture and engineering firms for the redesign of the station. Proposals are due in July and a winner will be selected in the fall. J-51 joins 421a in the graveyard of real estate benefits as The decades-old tax exemption program J-51, which incentivized landlords to renovate apartment buildings expired on June 29. Rent board approves first full-year, post-Covid hike of 3.25%. Landlords and tenants, both unhappy with vote, say reform is needed to the chagrin of both sides, the Rent Guidelines ...
  
  
• July 2022 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Industrial real estate investment volume rose by 31% year-over-year to $1.8 billion. This followed a record-setting fourth quarter of 2021, during which investment volume doubled year-over-year to $5.2 billion and nearly a third of the year’s transactions were completed. The tri-state area had a record $10.6 billion in industrial real estate deals last year, a 64% increase from the previous year. New York City had almost $3.6 billion in industrial real estate investment volume last year, with Queens experiencing a nearly 50% year-over-year increase to nearly $1.5 billion. RXR and the Blackstone Group are marketing 1330 Sixth ...
  
  
• June 2022 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Vornado hopes to sell 40 Fulton Street for $130 million and $140 million. The REIT’s 1980s-era office property at 40 Fulton Street in the Financial District is for sale, a 29-story building. Oceanwide Holdings has lost control of a Manhattan development site where it planned to build a 1,500-foot skyscraper at 80 South Street. Buildings Sold: Host Hotels & Resorts sold the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, a 1,780-room hotel, located at 811 7th Avenue to MCR Investors for $323 million. RFR Holding and Penske Media Corporation finalized the $290 million purchase of 475 Fifth Avenue. ...
  
  
• May 2022 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: SL Green Realty has to sell its $120 million stake in Times Square’s Crowne Plaza hotel, after a judge ruled that investor Andrew Penson has the right to buy it. SL Green and Argent Ventures are fighting over control of the land underneath the 795-room hotel at 1601 Broadway, which is in default on its $330 million mortgage. Brookfield Asset Management and China Investment Corporation are selling One New York Plaza, their 50-story office building in the Financial District. Nightingale Properties is selling 300 Lafayette Street. Bids on the property, which features 63,000 square feet of office ...
  
  
• April 2022 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Developers have started office projects totaling 2.1 million square feet since the beginning of 2021, well below the 3.2 million square feet of office construction starts in 2019 and the 5.7 million square feet of office construction starts in 2020. There are 19 million square feet of office construction underway in Manhattan. Deliveries are expected to surpass supply in both 2022 and 2023, increasing the supply of office stock by 4%, after that, however, office deliveries will likely begin to fall off in 2024, a decline that may continue through 2027. Many office tenants appear to be ready to ...
  
  
• April 2022 New York New Developments
• Major Developments A New York state bill would change disclosure rules for limited liability companies, requiring them to disclose “beneficial owners,” defined as those who have a membership interest in the LLC on the LLC’s annual tax returns, and that the Department of State assign each beneficial owner an identification number that would appear in a database along with the LLCs tied to that person. City Council Committee revealed an influx of filings for eviction and the moratorium was lifted, threatening to overwhelm legal aid providers. The flood of eviction cases could swamp the court system. Courts have turned to ...
  
  
• March 2022 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Tech companies leased 76% more space year-over-year in the last three quarters of 2021. Santander Bank is relocating its headquarters to WeWork and subletting 160,000 square feet at 437 Madison Avenue. Hermès inked a lease at 550 Madison Avenue. The brand signed a three-floor, 71,757-square-foot lease relocating from 55 East 59th Street. Mutual of America Financial Group signed a lease for 252,000 square feet it already occupies. A year before the company brought in a joint venture partner to co-own the 766,000-square-foot property. First Service Residential took 48,000 square feet at the Midtown building across the ninth and 10th ...
  
  
• February 2022 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Retail: Manhattan’s retail market is slowly making a comeback. Last quarter aggregate leasing velocity rose to about 1.86 million square feet. The figure is up 17% from the prior quarter, but still 14% below the prior year.The number of direct ground-floor availability in the fourth quarter decreased to 266 spaces from the 282 recorded in the third quarter, across the 16 retail corridors. On Broadway in SoHo, availability dropped 24% from 25 to 19 spaces. The average retail asking rent in those 16 retail corridors dropped about 1% to $597 per square foot or 8% below the prior year. This ...
  
  
• February 2022 New York New Developments
• Major Developments Tentative property Real Estate Tax assessments for rental buildings in New York City are up 8.6%. Rental buildings’ market value jumped by 11.7%, while the assessed value that owners are taxed on rose by 8.6%. Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed $2 billion in pandemic relief money that could fund the emergency rental assistance program. Extell Development received permits for a more than 541,000-square-foot, 1,350-key hotel tower at 740 Eighth Avenue in the Theater Subdistrict, an area exempt from the recently enacted requirement that developers must obtain a special permit for new hotels. Hakimian filed documents changing a 113,000-square-foot Midtown ...
  
  
• December 2021 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Retail: Black Friday no longer appears to be the saving grace of retailers. Retail traffic dropped 28.3% from 2019. International flight bookings to NYC for the month were down 45% from 2019 levels but should increase as President Biden is now allowing vaccinated international travelers to come to the US. CVS Health is shutting almost 1,000 stores in the next three years as it looks to develop new health care outlets. They will close approximately 300 stores on an annual basis in the next three years, one-tenth of CVS’ 10,000-store retail footprint. Tourneau, signed a lease for about 3,500 square ...
  
  
• December 2021 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: 740 West End Avenue, a 14-story, 135,000-square-foot, pre-war apartment building, is owned by Wolk Properties. The property has six commercial units and 95 residential units, 57 of which are rent-stabilized, averaging approximately 1,000 square feet. Madison Capital and Lubert-Adler Partners are looking to sell the leasehold interest on 71 Fifth Avenue. The property could fetch as much as $150 million. 8 Spruce Street, a 76-story highrise, are seeking north of $850 million. Brookfield Property Partners and Nuveen. 5 East 59th Street, a nine-story, mixed-use building, is facing foreclosure by a Singaporean investment bank. PWM Property Management filed ...
  
  
• November 2021 New York New Developments
• Major Developments The City Planning Commission approved a high-profile proposal to rezone Soho and Noho to allow for more residential and ground-floor retail. The proposal covers 56 blocks in the neighborhoods, largely zoned for manufacturing use. Hotel developers in New York City may soon face a large obstacle to getting their projects approved. The City Planning Commission approved a zoning text amendment to require special permits for all new hotel construction, sending the proposal on to the City Council. Radson Development’s plans up for City Council review call for a 794,000 square-foot, mixed-use building at 495 Eleventh Avenue consisting of ...
  
  
• September 2021 New York New Developments
• New Developments New York City has a 10.5% unemployment rate, almost twice the national average. The city has lost around 500,000 jobs since the start of the pandemic that have yet to be replaced. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the vaccine mandate would begin on August 17 and require many indoor businesses to check for proof of vaccination before allowing patrons to enter. At that point, penalties for compliance failure will begin at $1,000 and can rise to $5,000 for repeat offenders. 63% of the city’s population is at least partially vaccinated, with 56% of the population fully vaccinated. ...
  
  
• September 2021 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: Edison Properties, which manages the storage provider, is working with Eastdil Secured to find a buyer. The company may be the largest market among Manhattan storage providers. The leasehold for 587 Fifth Avenue, a 10-story, mixed-use building between 47th and 48th Streets, is asking $36 million. Infinity Collective holds the ground lease. The building has 4,000 SF retail and 38,600 square feet of office space. It is 66% leased. The ground lease runs through August 2079, and annual payments rise in fixed steps from $655,000 today to $750,000 in 2036, then drops to $600,000 from 2041 on. ...
  
  
• August 2021 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Landlords have reduced office rent. Average asking Manhattan office rent in the second quarter was $72.77 a foot, down 8.2% from a year ago, and down 0.6% from the first quarter. Leasing volume from April through June was 4.5 million square feet, which was up by 43% from the same period last year, but unchanged from the first quarter which was 45% lower than Manhattan’s five-year rolling average, 8.27 million square feet. There was a gradual tightening of subleasing availability as companies reduced the amount of space they had for sublease. Manhattan sublet availability shrank by 340,000 square feet ...
  
  
• July 2021 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale: 14 Vesey Street, a rare historically vacant building, is for sale for an undisclosed amount in Downtown, Manhattan. A lot is available at 347 Lexington Avenue for sale to establish a hotel. The asking price is $10,000,000. It is 20 stories tall with 65 rooms. Two properties at 1984-90 3rd Avenue are for sale for $15,000,000. There are four retail units. Buildings Sold: Premier Equities acquired a 17,500-square-foot hotel building at 130 Duane Street for $18 million. The seller was Hersha Hospitality Management. Steven Schnall and Howard Lev sold an 8,300-square-foot, mixed-use building at 287 Bleecker Street ...
  
  
• June 2021 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: Companies that listed their offices for sublease are now pulling them off the market. At least 589,000 square feet of space that was offered for sublease has been delisted. Subleases now account for 30% of total vacant office space. 3.5 million square feet of office space was offered for sublease in the first quarter of the year, compared to 4 million square feet in the fourth quarter of 2020, and 4.6 million square feet in the third quarter of that year. Average asking rent was $72.97 a foot, down 0.4% from March and 8.3% from a year ago. Net ...
  
  
• June 2021 New York New Developments
• New Developments The Gateway tunnel is back on track. Federal officials completed their environmental review of the $11.6 billion rail tunnel, giving the project the green light. The move comes after years of delays from the Trump administration. The plan calls for building a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River, which would connect New Jersey’s Bergen Palisades to New York’s Penn Station. The approval could potentially advance real estate acquisitions and other pre-construction activities. State lawmakers are seeking to give New York City more control over Cuomo’s Penn Station expansion and new development in the surrounding area. A recently ...
  
  
• April 2021 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office: As Covid vaccinations bring a return-to-office closer to fruition, more companies are expecting to reduce their real estate footprints. 21% of company executives expect to reduce their office space in the next 12 months, up by 3% points from the third quarter. Total office leasing was also 43% lower than the 2020 monthly average volume of 1.58 million square feet.in 2020. Nearly half of companies expect that employees will be back in offices by September. As of early March, just 10% of Manhattan office employees have returned to the workplace. Some believe the trend of working-from-home or work-from-anywhere is ...
  
  
• March 2021 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments New York’s moratorium on commercial evictions and foreclosures and a bill to replace it has hit a roadblock. The current ban from March 2020 moratorium on commercial evictions and foreclosures, which he has repeatedly extended. The latest extension, through a Jan. 23 executive order, prevents those actions from taking place until Feb. 22. But Cuomo has yet to take action on legislation that would make the ban semi-permanent. The state Senate proposed a bipartisan commission to review Cuomo’s orders, and Assembly Democrats have also called for the revocation of those powers. The rate of positive Covid ...
  
  
• February 2021 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan Office: Manhattan’s office availability hit a record high of 14.3%, 16.3% higher than the third quarter and up 43% from a year ago. A big chunk of that 24.2% was sublet inventory, which expanded by 6.45 million square feet in the past year. Overall, the pandemic left a large scar in Manhattan’s office market in 2020, reducing the annual leasing volume to 18.9 million square feet, down by 56% from a year ago. Leasing Sublease space in Manhattan’s office market continued to grow in the last quarter of the year, and has now reached the highest level this century. ...
  
  
• February 2021 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Real estate leaders in New York have admitted that there’s a long road ahead before things return to normal or a new normal. WeWork recently exited four locations in Midtown, Soho and the Meatpacking District. Knotel declared bankruptcy. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing a plan to get employees back in office buildings and office landlords are on board. Cuomo announced that rapid testing would be used in state-designated orange zones to open office buildings, along with restaurants and theaters. He said that major commercial operators with space totaling more than 100 million square feet have already ...
  
  
• January 2021 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan Office: Breather, the flexible office provider, is to close all of its locations, totaling more than 400 across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Deutsche Bank could move up to half of its Manhattan employees to smaller U.S. hubs in the next five years, as it plans a major building downsize. The potential move could be another blow to Manhattan’s hobbled office real estate market. Deutsche is in the process of relocating from its 1.6-million-square-foot office at 60 Wall Street to a 1-million-square-foot building at Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle. The new location has workspaces for 4,200 people, ...
  
  
• January 2021 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Covid-19 vaccines are being distributed. A return to the office likely will not happen until early summer. It will take months for the vaccine rollout to become effective and for employees to reach herd immunity, meaning remote work will continue into the next year and office rents will continue to drop. Some companies are planning their return to the office in light of the vaccine news. In New York, 25 new tenants per week were searching for office space in the first two weeks of December, up from 20 per week in November. New York has ...
  
  
• December 2020 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments The planned redevelopment of the Grand Hyatt Hotel could consist of a supertall tower rising more than 1,600 feet. The development at 109 East 42nd Street is tentatively called the Project Commodore. The proposed building would have 2.1 million square feet of office space, a 500-room hotel, around 10,000 square feet of open-air public space with 43,370 square feet of retail. Vornado Realty Trust has suspended its efforts to sell two office towers that it co-owns with the Trump Organization. They had been looking for a buyer for its 70% stake in the buildings, located at ...
  
  
• November 2020 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Tourism in NYC has fallen by 80% and nearly 9 in 10 office employees are still working remotely. The New York City Employees’ Retirement System ramped up its exposure only to see it underperform the stock market by $260 million and rack up at least $110 million in fees between 2016 and 2019. The pandemic has shaved $16 billion off projected construction spending in 2020 and 2021. The New York Building Congress estimates spending will reach $55.5 billion this year, down from the $65.9 billion previously forecasted. Next year, spending will be just about flat at ...
  
  
• September 2020 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to cut service by 40% if Washington does not send $12 billion in federal aid, crippling the city’s chances to come back from the pandemic. The timeline for the overhaul of John F. Kennedy International Airport will likely be pushed back years because of plummeting passenger demand. Passenger volume is down 85%, and officials warn that passenger numbers might not match last year’s level of nearly 62 million passengers until 2023. July was the slowest month of the year for large construction applications. The total size of the 10 biggest projects ...
  
  
• June 2020 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office Office leasing was virtually dead, except for TikTok who just rented 232,000 at 4 Times Square. A few landlords have lowered prices. Many are taking a wait and see attitude until Tenants return to work and the dust has settled. Retail The brick and mortar apocalypse keeps getting worse, as more national chains declare bankruptcy or announce store closings. Mom and pop retail is faring far worse with many lacking reserves to stay in business. Restaurants will hurt even more, once they partially open and have to pay full rent. Sales Building sales were very very slow with only ...
  
  
• June 2020 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a package of Covid-19 relief bills, including one that temporarily bars landlords from going after restaurants and store owners’ personal assets. Attempting to enforce such provisions constitutes harassment under the measure. New York state’s coronavirus foreclosure ban does not apply to mezzanine loans. The last observation deck at the Chrysler Building closed in 1945 and will now be getting a new one. RFR Realty received unanimous approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission for the new deck on the terraces that frame the 61st floor of the 77-floor tower. They ...
  
  
• May 2020 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan Office Office Leasing in April was near zero with brokers unable to show, so the only deal done were started long ago. March was dead quiet and all showings stopped in Mid March. February leaving numbers showed a 41% drop in month-over-month leasing volume compared to January, across all three Manhattan sub-markets. Leasing volume for the quarter totaled 6.82 million square feet, the fewest since the third quarter of 2013. Office leasing in Manhattan ended the first quarter of 2020 on a low note, with the coronavirus pandemic putting a damper on all types of economic activity. Manhattan Retail: ...
  
  
• April 2020 New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Gov. Andrew Cuomo barred all employees of non-essential businesses from reporting to work, and laid out what amounts to shelter-in-place rules for New Yorkers, though he avoided the phrase. The order exempts food businesses and others deemed essential. After saying he will halt all residential and commercial evictions for 90 days, Cuomo noted that landlords would have a hard time renting out vacant apartments anyway, and real estate agents can’t show apartments under the new workforce rules. About $20 billion in retail property loans are coming due, and it’s unclear how much of that debt will ...
  
  
• March 2020 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Cosi has filed for Chapter 11 for the second time in four years. The company has locations across the U.S. Modell’s Sporting Goods is renegotiating leases in more than 150 locations across 10 states. They sent letters to 19 landlords pleading with them to “dig deeper” so the retailer can avoid filing for bankruptcy. The latest proposal to expand Penn Station includes buying a full city block to the south for an entirely new terminal with eight tracks. The governor now has sights on West 30th and West 31st streets between Seventh and Eighth avenues for the “Empire ...
  
  
• February 2020 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Amazon leased a warehouse in Staten Island containing 450,000 square feet next to the 855,000-square-foot distribution center in 2017. The new warehouse will focus on last-mile deliveries. Gulliver’s Gate, the miniature-landscapes attraction finally closed its location at 229 West 43rd Street. The two-and-a-half year old company filed for bankruptcy with a plan to restructure its business, which reportedly struggled under the weight of its $5.7 million annual rent. Uncommon Schools signed a deal to take around 42,000 square feet at Rudin Management’s 55 Broad Street. The 15-year lease covers the second and third floors at the 30-story tower. ...
  
  
• January 2020 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: New York City’s hotel inventory includes 113 new developments to open in the next few years, with just over half located outside Manhattan. New York’s hotel inventory will reach 144,000 rooms by the end of 2021 up 65% from the 87,000 rooms the city had in 2010. Chang has filed plans for his biggest hotel yet. The 34-story, 974-room development at 150 West 48th Street. Michael Bloomberg is moving his presidential campaign headquarters from the Upper East Side to Times Square. The new headquarters are located at 229 West 43rd Street, 8th floor. New York City will end ...
  
  
• December 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Tourism in New York City continues to rise but the Times Square submarket retail market has declined in retail pricing. Macy’s same store sales fell 3.9% at stores open for the last year. Target’s physical stores and online shop saw a 4.5% bump, with a 10% increase in clothing sales. The EB-5 program’s new federal regulations are in effect, and will double the minimum dollar amount that all foreign visa-seekers must put into development projects. Under the new regulations, investors must contribute $900,000 from the previous $500,000 for a project in a low employment zone. The investment amount ...
  
  
• November 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Barneys has been sold to Authentic Brands Group and B. Riley for around $270 million. The new owners will likely shut Barneys’ locations, including its 275,000-square-foot flagship property at 660 Madison Avenue. IBM is looking for 500,000 square feet to consolidate its New York office space from multiple locations including a WeWork. IBM’s lease at WeWork’s 88 University runs through 2024. Vornado Realty Trust has encountered more retail challenges as Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy protection. However, Forever 21 may be able to keep its stores at 435 Seventh Avenue and 1540 Broadway open for a bit longer. ...
  
  
• October 2019 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Market Overview: Leasing was slow last month with the top 10 leases comprising only of 464,100 versus last month total of 2.9 million square feet. The total is also down year-over-year. The top 10 office leasing deals of August 2018 totaled about 1.3 million square feet. EisnerAmper inked a 15-year lease for 125,000 square feet of space at 733 Third Avenue, The landlord is the Durst Organization. New York Times signed a 15-year lease for 57,846 square feet of space at 24-01 44th Road. The landlord is United Nations Federal Credit Union. WeWork firm inked a 15-year lease for 56,000 ...
  
  
• October 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: WeWork is pulled its public offering. Neumann’s was removed as CEO from Wework. The reported value plummeted at least two-thirds from its once $47 billion. 20 people aligned with the former CEO Adam Neumann are leaving the company.WeWork’s parent company bought 14 venture-backed startups since 2014. The We Company is now trying to shed some of those acquisitions, many of which were purchased with stocks leaving some investors feeling stuck. Banks seek to revise Adam Neumann’s $500 million credit line. Following a cool reception from investors over his company’s valuation, lenders are looking to revise the terms of ...
  
  
• September 2019 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Market Overview: Midtown office leasing continued to slow, totaling just under 1 million square feet, down 21% from the month before and 26% year-over-year. The availability rate stayed flat at 10.6% while average asking rent rose to $88.20. Leasing activity in Midtown South slowed with 610,000 square feet in leases signed, a 20% decline from last month. The availability rate ticked down to 10%, and the average asking rent fell to $83.12 per square foot. Lower Manhattan office leasing jumped to 890,000 square feet, nearly double the month prior, making the first half of 2019 the submarket’s strongest half-year since ...
  
  
• September 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Signs of an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China caused real estate stocks to dip but then largely performed well compared to the overall market. Nuveen is joining Taconic Investment Partners on its $230 million purchase of a portion of ABC campus on the Upper West Side. The new owners plan to convert one of the properties, an office building at 125 West End Avenue, into space for life science tenants. No plans are clear for the other two properties: studio space at 320 West 66th Street and a property known as Lot 61. WeWork has ...
  
  
• August 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Several New York landlords have resisted leasing large chunks of their buildings to co-working tenants. One prominent owner is Empire State Realty Trust who will not lease to WeWork. The Durst Organization rejected WeWork’s offer to lease 12 floors at the World Trade Center in hopes that there were better offers. Oscar Health is doubling it spaced in Hudson Square and signed a sublease for the fourth floor at One Hudson Square, bringing its total presence to 160,000 square feet. The asking rent was around $80 per square foot. Barneys luxury fashion is reportedly weighing a second bankruptcy, ...
  
  
• May 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Financial services accounted for 39% of the leasing activity, of which 13% was leased by co-working companies. Coworking had accounted for 12% of leasing volume last year and 5% in 2017. TAMI followed with 16% of leasing volume in the first quarter. There were six Midtown deals over 100,000 square feet. Sumitomo’s 266,000 square foot renewal and expansion at 277 Park Avenue and the Bank of Montreal’s 215,000 square foot relocation to 151 West 42nd Street. Job growth in New York City increased by 1.8% with 68,700 jobs added by the private sector from 2018 to 2019. The ...
  
  
• April 2019 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: Gyms and athletic wear retailers once again dominated the retail leasing scene last month in New York City, securing four of the top 10 biggest deals. The rest mostly comprised of restaurants. The biggest retail lease deals signed last month totaled 188,100 square feet, down 41,600 square feet from January’s total of 229,700 square feet. In February of 2018, the top 10 retail leases totaled 108,200 square feet. Hermès of Paris inked a lease for 40,000 square feet of space at 706 Madison Avenue for a new flagship location. The building’s landlord is Friedland Properties. Brooklyn Boulders signed ...
  
  
• March 2019 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments Amazon has decided against coming to New York City. The company won’t build a new campus in Queens. Amazon was reconsidering its selection of New York, amid fierce political opposition. Much of the blowback sprung from the $3 billion state and city incentive offered to the company to come to the city. The company also indicated that it isn’t planning to reboot a search for another location, instead will focus on its new headquarters. The gallery space at Sotheby’s auction house is being upgraded and expanded at their headquarters on 1334 York Avenue for $55 million. ...
  
  
• January 2019 New York New Developments
• NYC Major Developments: Overall, November’s top office leases outpaced October’s top office leases. The 10 biggest deals signed last month totaled 1.8 million square feet, up 400,000 square feet from October’s total of 1.4 million square feet. The largest office lease in November was signed in Grand Central. Bloomberg LP renewed its 11-year lease for 468,000 square feet of space at 120 Park Avenue. Ralph Lauren expanded its lease for 350,000 square feet of space at 601 West 26th Street. RXR Realty refinanced the property with a $900 million loan from New York Community Bank. Peloton signed a lease for ...
  
  
• January 2019 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings for Sale: Coca-Cola is looking to sell its building on Fifth Avenue. The soft drink maker has put the 18-story, 354,000-square-foot building it owns at the corner of 55th Street on the market. Coca-Cola, which inherited the building at 711 Fifth Avenue in 1983 with its purchase of Columbia Pictures “has determined that it does not need to retain its investment in the building to support its activities in New York. New York Buildings Sold: SJP Properties and longtime partner Prudential Financial bought the Midtown South office building at 470 Park Avenue South for $245 million. The ...
  
  
• November 2018 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: L&L; Holding Company and Normandy Real Estate Partners are trying to upgrade the Terminal Stores warehouse in West Chelsea into a $1.8 billion property in four years. They plan to spend an additional $220 million to renovate the property which will need approvals from the city Landmarks Preservation Commission, call for the creation of 100,000 square feet of glass penthouse space on top of the building. The project’s setup is estimating rents of $135 per square foot for the penthouse office space. New York City hotel developers are about to lose nearly half of the land ...
  
  
• November 2018 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale: Barnett’s Extell Development put the 600-unit building at 555 10th Avenue on the market with an asking price of $775 million. The owners of 417 Park Avenue are making another push to co-op the apartment building. 417 Park is a 13-story building that has fielded interest from a number of buyers in recent years, including a $250 million offer from Kushner Companies. Trinity Real Estate is looking to ground lease one of its Hudson Square development sites in a deal that could be worth $180 million or more. Trinity Church put the development site at the ...
  
  
• September 2018 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: Manhattan dominated the list of New York City’s top 10 largest real estate projects in July. Marx Development Group’s roughly 213,000-square-foot hotel and retail project at 450 11th Avenue in Hudson Yards. Covenant House is planning a 12-story, 60-unit building in Hudson Yards about 53,000 square feet. Its new project would replace a smaller eight-story youth homeless shelter currently on the site of 460 West 41st Street. 323 East 61st Street from the William Macklowe Company will span about 50,000 square feet and stand six stories and 74 feet tall. WeWork just signed a 258,344-square-foot lease ...
  
  
• August 2018 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings for sale: Brookfield Property Partners is in talks to buy a stake in the 1,400-unit Waterside Plaza complex in Kips Bay. The $600 million deal is not yet finalized and there’s no guarantee it will go through. The complex includes apartments, stores and space rented to the British International School of New York. The owner is Richard Ravitch. A six story building at 75 Warren Street is for sale for $12,950,000 or $1,199.07 SF. It has commercial space with 16-foot ceilings. 240 Fifth Avenue is a 5 story commercial building for sale with an asking price of ...
  
  
• July 2018 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan Office Demand for Manhattan office space was robust last month and ahead of 2018’s leasing total at this point last year. Manhattan recorded 4.17 million square feet of new leases and renewals last month, almost 83% higher than in May of last year. Downtown accounted for 1 million square feet of leasing, more than double the figure from a year earlier. Manhattan’s average asking office rent increased nearly 1% to $74.04. Midtown and Midtown South ranked as the sixth and seventh most expensive office markets in the world. Companies downtown like Condé Nast and Liberty Mutual put more than ...
  
  
• July 2018 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings for sale: RXR and Walton Street want to sell 237 Park Avenue, with an unofficial price tag of around $1.4 billion. Host Hotels may sell some of its non-core hotels that could exceed $2 billion. Host owns multiple hotels in New York City, including the W Union Square and the New York Helmsley. It is close to selling the W to Westbrook Partners. A subsidiary of Blackstone Group, EQ Office, is putting one of its office buildings near Bryant Park on the block. The 22-story, 350,000-square-foot property is at 114 West 41st Street with an unofficial asking ...
  
  
• June 2018 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: The top 10 office leases totaled 1.9 million square feet, much larger than the previous month’s top 10 leases, which totaled 996,000 square feet. Pfizer signed a lease for 800,000 square feet of office space at 66 Hudson Boulevard. Latham & Watkins signed a lease for the 25th through the 34th floors, totaling for 407,000 square feet at 1271 Sixth Avenue. Jet.com inked a lease for 200,000 square feet of warehouse space at 1055 Bronx River Avenue. The asking rent was $22.00 per square foot. McDermott Will & Emery signed a 20-year lease for around 106,000 ...
  
  
• May 2018 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: 666 Fifth Avenue announced that the tower lost $25 million in 2017, largely due to the debt service on the property outweighing its net income. Chinese developer Zhonghong Holdings has defaulted on more than $174 million debt, just one year after the company tried to buy a senior living facility chain. Brookdale Senior Living for $4 billion. Co-working companies have stepped up their game in New York City, increasingly competing with traditional commercial landlords for the same tenants. Sixteen co-working companies have leased 664,000 square feet in the city so far in 2018. Brookfield Property Partners ...
  
  
• April 2018 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: An Upper East Side retail site that has been vacant for more than two years will soon be Morton Williams. A curated version of the supermarket is coming to 1251 Third Avenue, the former site of a Talbot’s. The grocery store chain has taken 13,000 square feet across two floors, with an asking rent of $2 million per year. Chinese investment in the United States’ commercial real estate has plummeted by 55% last year, dropping from $16.2 billion in 2016 to $7.3 billion in 2017. Purplebricks, a London-based discount brokerage, received $177 million equity investment from ...
  
  
• March 2018 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings for sale: HNA Group will put $4 billion in U.S. properties on the market, including 245 Park Avenue, the Manhattan office tower it paid $2.2 billion for just last year. The Roe Corporation is looking to sell the 131,000-square-foot development site with approved plans for a 45-story condominium-and-hotel tower overlooking City Hall Park at 267 Broadway. Ares Management is looking to sell its 50% stake in a Greenwich Village office building at 799 Broadway that its partner Normandy Real Estate Partners is planning to demolish and replace with a ground-up, Class-A office building. The sale of the ...
  
  
• February 2018 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• New York Office: Manhattan’s office market saw average asking rents fall in 2017 for the first time in seven years, as landlords lowered prices and more expensive spaces left the market. Average asking rents declined slightly to $72.74 per square foot. Lower Manhattan asking rents increased year-over-year (up 6.8% to $63 per square foot). Hudson Yards/Manhattan West supplanted the Plaza District as Manhattan’s most expensive submarket, though its small size 7.74 million square feet compared to the Plaza District’s 55.3 million square feet, makes it much more sensitive to shifts in pricing. The submarkets of Soho, Murray Hill, Hudson Square, ...
  
  
• February 2018 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: The supply of hotel rooms in the Financial District grew 10.7% last year, with another 1,917 rooms in the pipeline. Hotels continue to be built despite the softening of the overall hotel market. There are more hotel rooms slated to come online in 2018 than any year since, at least 2000. Developers have already delivered 26,193 rooms since 2013. Kushner Companies’ retail condominium at the old New York Times building could be facing challenges in the wake of Guy Fieri’s restaurant closing. Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, a yet-to-be opened food hall run by celebrity chef ...
  
  
• January 2018 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Office rents on Fifth Avenue are the second-most expensive in the country. Average asking rents on the Midtown stretch between 50th and 61st streets clocked in at $116.04 per square foot, and at the top end of the range reached $185 per square foot. Manhattan’s office-leasing market stood tall. Tenants flocked to get deals done, particularly in new buildings on the Far West Side and in Lower Manhattan, pushing leasing volumes ahead of last year’s figures. In fact, half of the year’s Top 10 most valuable office leases were inked at Hudson Yards and Manhattan West. The 10 biggest new ...
  
  
• January 2018 New York New Developments
• Co-working is coming for two of the country’s leading office building owners. Blackstone Group-owned Equity Office and Houston-based Hineshave both released RFPs looking for partners to help them gain experience in the co-working business currently dominated by WeWork. Equity Office is particularly interested in figuring out how to make tenants more interested in their Howard Hughes office complex in Los Angeles, and the company expects responses to their RFP in the next few days. WeWork has lately been seeing explosive growth and is currently valued at $20 billion. The firm has launched a gym and elementary school in recent months ...
  
  
• January 2018 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings For Sale: Chinese developer is looking to sell the 50-story, 492-key Holiday Inn Manhattan-Financial District. There is no official asking price for the hotel, which opened in 2014, but assumed to be north of $300 million for the property. RFR Realty has given up on developing condominiums at 67 Vestry Street, opting to sell the site to Elliott Aronson’s Iliad Realty Group for $55.5 million. New York Buildings Sold: Sunny K Realty paid $13.5 million for an 18-unit mixed-use building at 18 East 23rd Street. The Gramercy Park property includes 16 apartments and two commercial units, and ...
  
  
• August 2017 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: Starwood Mortgage Capital provided a $105 million loan for Aurora Capital Associates and William Gottlieb Real Estate’s Restoration Hardware project in the Meatpacking District. The 10-year loan retires a $60 million loan from Wells Fargo. Aurora and Gottlieb are building a 60,000-square-foot retail project at 9-19 Ninth Avenue, where Restoration Hardware signed a 15-year lease worth $250 million. Northern Manhattan’s commercial real estate market was sluggish. A total of 138 properties sold in 154 deals for a total dollar volume of $694 million uptown, down 64% year-over-year. The average price per buildable square foot at development ...
  
  
• July 2017 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: NYU Langone Medical Center is opening a 50,000-square-foot biotech co-working center at 180 Varick Street, a project that hopes to help compete with biotech hubs like Boston and San Francisco. NYU Langone invested $10 million over the last several years on upgrades at 180 Varick Street and is investing another $5 million. The state’s economic development arm Empire State Development is contributing another $2 million. New York City is the most expensive city in the world when renting flexible, short-term office space. The average monthly price to rent a workstation in flexible offices for one person ...
  
  
• March 2017 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments: The city is taking another attempt at rezoning the Garment District, a move that will likely rollback rules that require landlords to lease a portion of their building to the fashion industry. The possible rezoning is connected to the Mayor’s plans to build a new manufacturing campus in Brooklyn. The Bloomberg administration tried to rezone the Garment District in 2009, but stopped the plan due to opposition. In the fourth quarter of 2016, absorption rate was negative in all three Manhattan office submarkets: Downtown, Midtown, and Midtown South for a total net absorption of negative 277,988 ...
  
  
• February 2017 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan office Manhattan office leasing has been on a gradual downward trend over the past 12 months. Tenants in 2016 leased 33.1 million square feet. The vacancy rate rose to 10.4% from 10% in 2015. 2016 was the third-highest office leasing total in the past 10 years, behind 37.38 million square feet in 2014 and the 33.92 million square feet leased in 2013. Investment sales in Manhattan declined 38% to $38.9 billion after 2015’s astronomical $63 billion. Office rents are projected to grow 1.5% in 2017, and retail rents to grow 1.7%. The Manhattan office market closed 2016 with an ...
  
  
• January 2017 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan office Manhattan Office leasing was down 4.2% in November and 16.2% year-over-year. Office availability in Midtown South is up, with subleasing comprising 27% of availability. Downtown leasing activity was slow as the market waits for big deals in the pipeline to close. Manhattan Retail Between fall 2015 and 2016, average asking rents fell in 11 of Manhattan’s 17 retail submarkets. The Flatiron District on Broadway between 14th and 23rd streets was hardest-hit, with asking rents down 23%. Herald Square as well as on Madison Avenue between 59th and 72nd streets saw asking rents drop 11%. Uncertainty continues in the ...
  
  
• December 2016 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: The city’s Human Resources Administration will renew its lease for 264,358 square feet at 109 East 16th Street and plans to spend more than $20 million on renovations. The proposed lease has a starting rent of $76.83 per square foot. As the market for land sales in Manhattan has cooled off amid a real estate slowdown, air rights trades have plummeted. The dollar volume spent on Manhattan air rights through the end of September totaled $70.69 million. That sum was down roughly 74% from the $269.78 million spent on deals that closed through the first nine months of ...
  
  
• December 2016 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings For Sale: Brookfield Property Partners has put the 45-story office tower at 245 Park Avenue up for sale. Sources close with the 1.8 million-square-foot tower believe it is worth north of $2.1 billion, or more than $1,200 per square foot. Lightstone Group hopes to sell the retail space and garage at the base of the Marriott Moxy Hotel in the Garment District, which is under construction, for $64 million. The developer is looking to offload a 4,000-square-foot retail condo and 27,000-square-foot garage at the 16-story building at 485 Seventh Avenue. Buildings Sold: United American Land bought 65 Spring Street ...
  
  
• November 2016 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings Sold: ABS Partners and Benenson Investment Company">ABS Partners and Benenson Investment Company paid $62.75 million for the office-and-retail building at 145-147 East 57th Street. The asking rent is $60 per square foot. The venture paid $17 million for 407 East 70th Street, a five-story medical building on the Upper East Side. ABS and Benenson 3 bought the fee at the AMC movie theater at 66 Third Avenue that has a ground lease through July 2037. Caspi Development and RWN Real Estate Partners bought a Tribeca art gallery for $19 million from a group of investors. The building ...
  
  
• September 2016 New York New Developments
• Major Developments: SL Green Realty says it has shaken a pesky lawsuit that threatened to stall the construction of its office building near Grand Central Terminal, One Vanderbilt. The REIT has settled a lawsuit filed by the owner of Grand Central, which alleged that the office landlord and the city rendered his 1.2 million square feet of air rights useless when it rezoned the area. The settlement was made possible, in part, by the recent sale of a stake in Grand Central to Michael Dell’s MSD Capital. In 2012, the Witkoff Group announced it would build a new hotel at ...
  
  
• September 2016 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings For Sale: Kevin Maloney’s Property Markets Group is looking to sell a newly built and still empty rental tower in Long Island City. PMG built the 45-story, 391-unit tower at 23-01 42nd Road in partnership with Vector Group and toyed with the possibility of turning the units into condominiums, filing a $364.2 million condo plan. Leasing at the tower is set to begin next week, with average asking rents of $62 per square foot. Since the building’s condo plan was approved, a potential buyer could opt to sell the units instead of renting them out. PMG and partner Hakim ...
  
  
• April 2016: New York New Developments
• New Developments Bizzi& Partners, Michael Shvo and New Valley raised $175 million through the EB-5 program from the Chinese for their 91-story tower at 125 Greenwich Street. The developers were about halfway to reaching their goal through the EB-5 program.Vornado plans to combine its One Penn and Two Penn Plaza office buildings to form a 4.2 million-square-foot complex. New renderings for the combined building of one and two Penn plaza show a new glass facade and canopy over Seventh Avenue from Penn Station revealing a reorganized lower-level retail space.Banks are exercising more caution when it comes to financing commercial real ...
  
  
• March 2016: New York New Developments
• New Developments Joseph Beninati's Bauhouse Group filed Friday for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the LLC entity that owns the 3 Sutton Place development site in Midtown. There is an upcoming foreclosure auction by Gamma's who holds more than $180 million in debt on the property at 426-432 East 58th Street. Bauhouse defaulted on nearly $129 million in loans last month that it had received from Gamma, led by Richard Kalikow, for its planned 68-story, Norman Foster-designed condo tower, also known as 3 Sutton Place. The $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub is about to open. It will connect to ...
  
  
• February 2016 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• There are more large office blocks available in Midtown now than at any time, and landlords who do not want to watch their spaces linger will have to be creative. More than 80 blocks of 100,000-plus square feet of available space in Midtown has been identified, a 60% increase over the number of spaces available at the peak of 2007. Through the first 11 months of 2015, sovereign wealth funds spent more than $22.6 billion on real estate in the United States, up from about $9.8 billion in 2014. Demand for well-located commercial properties remains high in Manhattan. The hotel ...
  
  
• February 2016: New York New Developments
• New Developments Water Street in the Financial District is a pedestrian wasteland. The BID aims to change that with a retail makeover. A re-zoning could make way for 167,357 square feet of new retail space, most of which would be built into existing arcade space on the ground floors of various buildings. It is essential to the revitalization of Lower Manhattan. The top 25 office tenants in Manhattan take up more than 56 million square feet of space, with JPMorgan Chase occupying 4.67 million square feet and Citigroup, occupying 4.49 million square feet. The City of New York occupies 7.22 ...
  
  
• January 2016: New York New Developments
• New Developments Retail:Overseas retail Brands operate 39% of the stores on Fifth and Madison Avenues and in Soho. Of the 906 retailers, Soho is the most nationally-diverse area, with 24 countries represented. Fifth Avenue had 17 non-U.S. outlets and Madison Avenue had 13. Italianstores had the largest number of stores in those areas.Footlocker and Nike signed leases for large spaces on Broadway. Footlocker signed a $15 million deal to lease 36,000 square feet at 1460 Broadway and Nike signed a $16 million lease for 55,000 square feet at 529 Broadway.Gap signed two leases at 1514 Broadway, into two stores for ...
  
  
• January 2016: New York Buildings For Sale
• New Developments Retail:Overseas retail Brands operate 39% of the stores on Fifth and Madison Avenues and in Soho. Of the 906 retailers, Soho is the most nationally-diverse area, with 24 countries represented. Fifth Avenue had 17 non-U.S. outlets and Madison Avenue had 13. Italianstores had the largest number of stores in those areas.Footlocker and Nike signed leases for large spaces on Broadway. Footlocker signed a $15 million deal to lease 36,000 square feet at 1460 Broadway and Nike signed a $16 million lease for 55,000 square feet at 529 Broadway.Gap signed two leases at 1514 Broadway, into two stores for ...
  
  
• December 2015: New York New Developments
• New Developments AvalonBay Communities is planning a new 33-story, mixed-use residential tower at the site of the former American Bible Society located in Lincoln Square. The building will house 160 apartments. There will also be 34,000 square feet of retail space on the lower levels.Vornado Realty Trust lauded a third quarter that saw it sign seven Manhattan office leases at asking rents of over $100 per square foot. Vornado completed 43 office leasing deals totaling 509,000 square feet in the third quarter at an average starting rent of $79.80 per square foot. The total year-to-date leasing activity was nearly 1.7 ...
  
  
• November 2015: New York New Developments
• New Developments Developer Bo Jin Zhu filed permit applications for a nine-story hotel and a 16-story apartment building at 412 West 126th Street and 402 West 126th Street. The two buildings together will contain a total of 129,000 square feet of space. UBS is looking for 700,000 and 900,000 square feet in Midtown for its New York headquarters. The company is being forced to move by its current landlord.The Columbus Avenue retail corridor on the Upper West Side has gone from zero vacancies in a 15-block stretch along Columbus Avenue to 14. The spike in retail vacancies is due to ...
  
  
• September 2015: New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale Unizo Holdings is buying Sherwood Equities and JPMorgan Chase's 370 Lexington Avenue office building for $247 million. 370 Lexington Avenue contains 311,000-square-foot.350 East 86th Street went into contract with Gary Barnett's Extell Development Company for $100 million. Innovo Property group and Artemis Real Estate Partners bought the 15,500-square-foot retail condo at 202 Canal Street for $44 million.Extell just acquired a 14-story office building at 10 West 47th Street for $74.4 million containing 72,000-square-foot building between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Gaia Real Estate is in contract to buy the rental conversion of a former St. Vincent's Midtown ...
  
  
• July 2015: New York New Developments
• New York University's campus expansion plans to expand the school by about 2 million square feet in Greenwich Village hasve been approved by Tthe New York State Court of Appeals.s gave an approval to New York University's campus expansion plans to expand the school by about 2 million square feet in Greenwich Village. Neighborhood activists sued to prevent the expansion, claiming it used land that was permanently designated for public park use. The plan will create new high rises on two blocks between West Third and Houston Streets and La Guardia Place and Mercer Street. FAO Schwarz is close to ...
  
  
• June 2015: New York New Developments
• Foot traffic on madison avenue has declined by 200,000 people over the last seven months when the Whitney closed in October. While many luxury retailers still maintain locations there, some of them are global brands that are simply there for the status and are actually losing money on the area rents.The City Council approved plans for One Vanderbilt, the 63-story, 1.6 million-square-foot office tower to be built next to Grand Central Station. The tower will be anchored by TD Bank, with 200,000 square feet. One Vanderbilt will deliver critically-needed, state-of-the-art Class A office space and dramatically upgrade Grand Central's overburdened ...
  
  
• April 2015: New York New Developments
• New Developments The Howard Hughes Corp. has just struck a deal with Edison Properties that allows the former to build a large mixed-use building straddling the border of the South Street Seaport Historic District.Community Board 5 will look to decide whether or not to extend the Madison Square North Historic District. Currently, the borders of the district are 25th and 29th streets and Sixth and Madison avenues. Under a new proposal which is in front of the board now, the district would be extended north to 34th Street and from Broadway to Park Avenue South.New renderings of Citigroup's planned headquarters ...
  
  
• February 2015: NYC New Developments
• Mitsui Fudosan started construction on 55 Hudson Yards. Its $1.4 billion office tower which is part of the 28-acre megaproject on Manhattan's West Side.Property Markets Group is planning to convert a four-story commercial building at 548 West 22nd Street into a 19-story residential development.Brookfield Office Properties said the total development cost for the first of its two Manhattan West office towers is more than $2 billion.A joint venture between Madison Equities, Building and Land Technology (BLT) and Joseph's Sitt Thor Equities received a $275 million construction loan to acquire and complete the gut renovation of 212 Fifth Avenue. BRP Corp. ...
  
  
• February 2015 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan's East Side office submarket had lower asking rents, while prices in Hudson Square rose dramatically after the rezoning. New office leases rose to 63% from 55% year from the previous year to year based on square footage leased.Mayor Bill de Blasio is seeking to raise taxes on virtual retailers that do business in New York but have no physical presence in the city.A continued surge in TAMI technology, advertising and media sector coupled with modest growth in the financial sector resulted in large amount of leasing and demand at its highest in nine years. The Manhattan commercial investment sales ...
  
  
• January 2015: New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings sold Jeff Sutton and General Growth Properties are buying the Crown Building at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street for $1.75 billion. The price works out to $4,490 per square foot, which sets a new world record for the price of an entire office building. The nearly 400,000-square-foot tower includes roughly 50,000 square feet of valuable retail space with retail tenants including: Bulgari , Mikimoto, Bank of America and Piaget. Broad Street Development purchased two Noho apartment buildings for a combined $178.5 million. The properties are located at 298 and 304 Mulberry Street. The buildings house 182 apartments, ...
  
  
• January 2015: NYC New Developments
• New Developments A new building by Cape Advisors at 535 Greenwich Street would have 26 floors and 116 condo units, on an L-shaped lot. The 57,500-square-foot warehouse site with 42,500-square-feet of buildable air rights. Kaled Management filed plans for a 10-story apartment building at 711 West End Avenue, also known as 306 West 95th Street. Alchemy Properties unveiled plans for a new 24-story tower in NoMad at 846-850 Sixth Avenue. It will contain 52 residences totaling 105,973 square feet or 2,000 square each condo. The tower will rise 316 feet and have a 3,100 square feet retail space. Demolition permits ...
  
  
• December 2014 NYC Buildings purchased & For to purchase
• New York Buildings sold The developer who is turning Verizon's former downtown headquarters into luxury condominiums has bought the building's 40,000-square-foot retail space for $40 million.A Developer acquired a three-story Upper West Side commercial building located at 2307 Broadway for $25.9 million. The 9,900-square-foot property, between West 83rd and 84th streets, is home to a Duane Reade store on the ground floor. There are offices on the upper floors.A Financial services firm acquired a 16-story office building at 21 Penn Plaza in Midtown from Savanna and the Feil Organization for an undisclosed price.A Canadian property investor and Chicago-based Callahan Capital ...
  
  
• October 2014 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings sold San Francisco-based Carmel Partners officially completed the purchase of a downtown development site for $171 million. The transaction also includes development rights.Potential buyers are in early discussions interested in buying the Diamond Center of America, a 16-story office tower that is being marketed as a potential redevelopment site. The building, located at 36-42 West 47th Street, is home to some of the top jewelry merchants in the world, but the property has a number of leases set to expire and is seen as a potential site for anything from new commercial development to residential or hospitality ...
  
  
• October 2014 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• NYC Commercial Real Estate Overview The Manhattan office leasing had a busy summer, with strong demand from the tech sector that is increasingly in expansion mode in Midtown South and beyond. Manhattan Class A office space average asking price of $76.00?RSF, up 8.8% from $69.42 in August of 2013. The borough had an absorption of 1.2 million square feet, and overall availability tumbled below 35 million square feet for the first time since December 2008.Although leasing in the New York City office market is much stronger than last year, There remain large blocks of vacant space in some of the ...
  
  
• May 2014 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings For Sale A West Side’s Hudson Yards development site, nearby parcel could sell more than $100 million. A nonprofit organization is selling a landmarked church for $50 million. The Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, the owner of the Church Missions House at 281 Park Avenue South, is looking to sell the century-old building to fund its services, including advocacy and management assistance for more than 200 churches and social-service groups. An affiliate of Walter & Samuels is looking to sell an Upper West Side parking garage site, which is being marketed as a potential redevelopment into condominiums. The 7,700-square-foot ...
  
  
• May 2014 New York New Developments
• Major Developments Duane Reade recently vacated a location next to department store H&M; and is now on the market. The unofficial asking rent for the property is nearly $8 million per year. Commune Hotels & Resorts, a San Francisco-based joint partnership between Thompson Hotels and Joie De Vivre Hotels, has plans to develop two more hotels in Manhattan. One will operate under the Thompson Hotel brand, while the other will have a different hotel brand. The properties, for which Commune has already inked deals, are looking to open in 2016. The lineup for Westfield Group’s central shopping hall within the ...
  
  
• March 2014 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Fifth Avenue retail rents remain high but a distant second to Hong Kong's Causeway Bay. Average Fifth Avenue Retail rents from 50th to 57th Street are $2,500 per square foot.Retail rents in the Financial District on Broadway have area increased 69 percent, over the last six months. The asking retail rents on Broadway between Battery Park and Chambers Street reached $257 per square foot.Tech companies usually get the credit for keeping the Manhattan office leasing market strong while financial and legal services are shrinking. However, the larger office deals in Manhattan signed over the past year have been in other ...
  
  
• March 2014 New York New Developments
• New Developments 68 Charlton Street Extell Development has submitted plans for a 22-story residential building in Hudson Square that would include the neighborhood its first affordable housing.Flushing Commons. Architect Perkins Eastman announced the master plan. Phase one will have 150 residential units and 220,000 square feet of office space, along with 1,600 parking spaces. Phase two will have 450 residential units and 280,000 square feet of commercial space, a 62,000-square-foot YMCA and an additional 15,000 square feet for community facilities. There will also be A 1.5-acre town square, built around a central fountain plaza.Phase one is aiming for an April ...
  
  
• December 2013: New York City New Developments
• New York City New Developments The state Public Authorities Control Board gave unanimous approval to the Empire State Development Corporation's $225 million National Urban League complex in Harlem. The project will include a civil rights museum, affordable housing and commercial space. Construction at 125th Street site will begin after the expiration of tenants' leases in 2015. The businesses currently occupying the site can apply for a low-interest loan for relocation services. However, lawsuits may still delay the complex.The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is looking to increase revenue by increasing the number of retail stores at subway stations and converting small spaces ...
  
  
• December 2013 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Fifth Avenue retail rents remain high but a distant second to Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. Average Fifth Avenue Retail rents from 50th to 57th Street are $2,500 per square foot.Retail rents in the Financial District on Broadway have area increased 69 percent, over the last six months. The asking retail rents on Broadway between Battery Park and Chambers Street reached $257 per square foot.Tech companies usually get the credit for keeping the Manhattan office leasing market strong while financial and legal services are shrinking. However, the larger office deals in Manhattan signed over the past year have been in other ...
  
  
• October 2013: NYC New Developments
• NYC New Developments Ace Hotel is converting a 10-story building at 225 Bowery into a hotel, despite earlier plans to turn it into apartments. The Lower East Side building’s owner, the Salvation Army Chinese Community Center, will close within the year. Ace is serving as a silent partner and developer on this and the Jarmulowsky Bank project at 52 Canal Street. That development, from DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners, is slated to be a 12-story, 105-unit hotel, and will be operated by Ace under a different name.Fairway Market is coming to the World Trade Center neighborhood. The market just signed ...
  
  
• September 2013: Manhattan New Developments
• Manhattan New Developments Architect Santiago Calatrava has been chosen to design the newGreek Orthodox Archdiocese Church of St. Nicholas at 130 Liberty Street. It will sit just south of the site of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub that the architect also designed..Sheldon Solow clock is running out at his long-dormant, six-acre lot between East 38th and East 41st streets on First Avenue. Mr. Solo could lose his permits and public approvals for a $4 billion project if he does not build a foundation for the office building or one of several apartment towers by this November.The battle to secure ...
  
  
• August 2013: New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Brookfield Office Properties has begun construction of a bridge 120,000 square feet for its Manhattan West project. Brookfield will be the first platform on Amtrak rail yards between ninth and 12th avenues. Time Warner has agreed in principle to move in 80-story skyscraper related companies planned for yards at the 10th Avenue and West 33rd Street, capping weeks of speculation on the movement of the media company in Hudson Yards, IMG Worldwide extend its lease at 304 Park Avenue South. And will now occupy 72,080 square feet. The lease also increased its initial term of 10 ...
  
  
• June 2013 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• The bulk of major retail corridors in Manhattan have seen as high as 55% annual jumps in average asking rents compared to the previous year. Developers are planning nearly 15 million square feet of new office space in the Hudson Yards area in the 30s on the Far West Side. The new projects expected to rise over the next decade include the Related Companies
  
  
• May 2013: NYC New Developments
• NYC New Developments Waterman Interests has signed a new 75-year deal with Benenson Capital Partners for the master lease at 400 Park Avenue. The Benenson family has owned the East 54th Street site since 1971. In 2010, Waterman along with some institutional investors paid $35 million to RFR Realty for the leasehold on the 270,000-square-foot property. At the time, the leasehold had 17 years remaining. Manhattan hotels have been popping up especially in the area around 29th Street. . Now there are nearly a dozen hotels clustered on and around 29th Street, including the trendy Ace Hotel, which opened in ...
  
  
• April 2013: Manhattan New Developments
• Manhattan New DevelopmentsThe Hudson Yards area is shaping up to be something of an office-{dynamic_word2} battleground, with the Moinian Group, Extell Development, the Related Companies and Brookfield Office Properties hunting for office tenants. Moinian's proposed 1.8 milllion-square-foot 3 Hudson Boulevard. Related's under-construction, 1.7 million-square-foot Coach building at 10th Avenue and 30th Street; and Brookfield's planned Manhattan West, which could bring 5.4 million square feet of office and residential space to Ninth Avenue. Extell has also proposed a 1.7 million-square-foot tower in the area dubbed 1 Hudson Yards. Peebles Corporation will pay $160 million for 346 Broadway, a 13-story building. Peebles ...
  
  
• March 2013 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale The nearly 41,600-square-foot Colonial Revival U.S. Post Office location at 217 West 18th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues is for sale.The SUNY board of trustees voted to close the Cobble Hill-based Long Island College Hospital. The sale of the 200,000-square-foot building, which could be converted into a residential development, may bring up to $500 million.Lehman Brothers is looking to sell its 90 percent stake in 425 Park Avenue. The 31-story, 567,340-square-foot building, located in Midtown East, is to be demolished and replaced with a 650,000-square-foot Norman Foster-designed office tower being developed by L&L Holdings, which ...
  
  
• March 2013: New York New Developments
• New York New Developments Acadia Realty Trust has defended its stance on hiring non-union workers for its City Point megaproject and responded to a trade group's accusation that the development exploits the community and wastes taxpayer dollars. They believe that City Point will generate thousands of jobs and enhance Downtown Brooklyn's quality of life. Acadia is committed to maximizing local and minority contracting and employment as they create a LEED-certified development with the affordable housing, retail and entertainment options that the neighborhood well deserves.A trio of Russian entrepreneurs is redeveloping a three-acre sports complex, slated to be the largest in ...
  
  
• February 2013 NYC Buildings For Sale
• Buildings For Sale In one of the largest land deals in years, Sheldon Solow has reached an agreement with a consortium led by JDS Development Group to sell a parcel of land overlooking the East River for roughly $200 million. The full-block piece of land is zoned for residential use, and there are intentions to build a 37-story tower and a 47-story tower on the site, with a total of more than 830 units. The deal is being financed primarily by a $125 million loan from UBS. The parcel being sold is the smaller of two plots totaling nine acres ...
  
  
• February 2013: New York City New Developments
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave New Yorkers whose homes were devastated by Hurricane Sandy a 30-day extension on applications for home repairs. The Transitional Sheltering Assistance program, which has helped New Yorkers continue living in participating hotels and motels, will also be extended. Governor Cuomo requested that FEMA grant extensions. Alexander McQueen plans to decamp to 747 Madison Avenue. The designer will lease a double-height 3,300-square-foot space owned by Jeff Sutton, paying $1,300 per square foot during the 15-year lease. Fashion label Escada previously took up a portion of the retail space. Before that, Valentino occupied the space during ...
  
  
• January 2013 Manhattan Buildings For Sale
• The Lehman Art House has undergone a price cut from $65 million to $49.9 million. The asking price still makes the art house New York's most expensive office property on a price-per-square-foot basis Sony has finally been able to line up bidders for its 550 Madison Avenue building. The potential buyers include the Rockefeller Group, Mitsui Fudosan America, Vornado Realty Trust, Boston Properties, as well as teams of pension funds and some high net worth individuals. New York's largest office tower is getting ready to reopen, after being shuttered by Hurricane Sandy for nearly a month and damaged by a ...
  
  
• December 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments 13 new hotels in the pipeline for the Lower East Side, tripling the number of hotel rooms in the neighborhood over the next few years. Four new hotels are scheduled to open, boosting the existing inventory by approximately 30 percent. Six other projects in various stages of construction and four of which are on a two-block strip along upper Orchard Street will add another 900 rooms. And three other recent proposals, a 130-room boutique hotel in the landmarked Jarmulowsky Bank building on Canal Street, a 376 room hotel/condo combination building on Chrystie Street and a Broome Street project ...
  
  
• November 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments The Chrysler Building just got a little greener. The Owner has received a LEED gold certification for the 1.2 million-square-foot office tower. Tishman spent two years updating the building’s energy, waste, water and maintenance systems. The upgrades include new plumbing fixtures that will cut the property’s water consumption by 64 percent; a waste-management policy that will ensure 81 percent of the building’s waste is recycled; and a 21 percent reduction in energy usage. The city’s plan to sell of three historic but outdated office buildings in Lower Manhattan, all of which would likely become luxury housing or hotels, ...
  
  
• October 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments The re-zoning of Midtown is to affect the area from Lexington to Fifth avenues and East 39th to East 57th streets. Developers can buy additional air rights from the city. Within a smaller Grand Central Sub district developers can buy from owners of landmarked properties that are under built. Argent Ventures controls nearly all of those air rights through its ownership of the Grand Central terminal. The record sale price was about $6,000 a square foot in 2008 in residential, and has now reached more than $10,000 a square foot. The very-rich have finally unleashed the liquidity that ...
  
  
• September 2012 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale A Coney Island development site ready for a 22-story building is hitting the market for $14 million.The property is located at 271 Seabreeze Avenue, near the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent to the Coney Island boardwalk and Seaside Park. It is zoned for residential, hotel or senior living use, and plans drawn up by owners American Development Group would sustain up to 153 apartments, or 183 extended-stay hotel rooms, and 102 parking spaces.A troubled 12-story commercial loft building Noho is scheduled for auction next month, after CW Capital foreclosed on the mortgage and sold the debt to ...
  
  
• September 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments The Related Companies has won wage-cutting agreements with some four dozen construction unions in its efforts to save money at the $15 billion development of Hudson Yards. The developer, one of the most outspoken for the need to cut construction costs during contract negotiations with unions last year, got the groups to agree to cut wages and benefit packages by 10 percent to ensure they would be commissioned to work the massive construction project expected to carry on for the next decade. The deal is not yet final.With public support, the Kingsbridge Armory ice rink plan may appear ...
  
  
• July 2012 New York Buildings For Sale
• Buildings for Sale Vantage Properties and Area Property Partners have unloaded the Savoy Park apartment complex in Harlem for more than $210 million, satisfying the outstanding balance on the senior mortgage. Larry Silverstein is cutting his losses and moving on from Lexington Avenue. His Silverstein Properties and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System have entered contract to sell the 35-story office building at 575 Lexington Avenue for about $360 million to Normandy Real Estate Partners and New York Life Insurance. The deal is worth $10 million less than the agreement the owners nearly struck with Rockrose Development, before Henry Elghanayan ...
  
  
• July 2012 New York New Developments
• Major Developments While details are sparse, Bowery Boogie is well underway on the 65,000-square-foot building, which has been covered in scaffolding for weeks. The renovation is being carried out by Lower East Side architecture firm Studio Castellano. The city’s Economic Development Corporation wants proposals from developers who would like to build and maintain underutilized industrial plots in three New York City boroughs. These include 95,000 square feet at 2399 Watson Avenue in the Bronx’s Zerega section, 80,000 square feet in East New York, Brooklyn, 53,000 square feet in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and 40,000 square feet in Queens’ College Point Corporate ...
  
  
• June 2012 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale Forest City Ratner is looking to find an investor to take as much as a 49 percent stake in 8 Spruce Street, the tallest residential building in New York. The 76-story, 903-unit Frank Gehry-designed building is now 80 percent occupied.Thor Equities is seeking $45 million for the three-story, 15,525-square-foot building, at 446 West 14th Street, between Washington Street and 10th Avenue that it bought for $23.4 million in 2007.Vornado Realty Trust is marketing its stakes in three New York City-area malls, as the investment trust looks to exit the sector. Vornado wants to unload a 32.4 ...
  
  
• June 2012 New York New Developments
• Major Developments A judge has rejected a bid by an investment partner at the Domino Sugar Factory to block its partner from recapitalizing the proposed $1.5 billion project. Express has signed for a flagship space in Times Square, believed to be at 1552 Broadway.The first retail stores at the World Trade Center site could open for business by March 2015. Westfield, which has a 50 percent stake in the WTC site’s retail space, said the first retailers will be announced in the first half of next year. The openings would come more than 13 years after the destruction of the ...
  
  
• May 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments Morgan Stanley just signed a lease for almost 1.2 million square feet of space at Brookfield Office Properties Inc.'s 1 New York Plaza in lower Manhattan. The bank, which currently occupies about 816,000 square feet at the building, will expand by an additional 337,000 square feet. The agreement is the largest office lease for a single building in New York since 2008. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s push to modernize Midtown East office buildings has become a legacy issue as the mayor’s reign whines to a close. Bloomberg wants to re-zone the area bounded by Third and Fifth avenues and ...
  
  
• April 2012 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• In the first quarter of 2012, Manhattan office leasing is the leanest it has been in almost three years. About 5.7 million square feet of space will be leased in the first three months of the year in Manhattan, marking the lowest volume of leasing since the second quarter of 2009, when 4.5 million square feet was leased. The pace of Manhattan leasing activity through February was down 40 percent from the same two months in 2011. Commercial landlords and real estate brokers alike are becoming frustrated with the lack of activity and the negative absorption since the final three ...
  
  
• April 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments A joint venture partnership including New York Ace Hotel owner and GFI Capital Resources Group Gross’ GB Lodging is set to puchase the Temple Court building, a nine-story city landmark at 5 Beekman Street formerly owned by the Chetrit Group and Bonjour Capital.Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a bill to declare a formal state of emergency in New York City with regard to housing, allowing him to extend rent regulations for another three year even thought there is a Supreme Court challenge The mayor cited a citywide residential vacancy rate of 3.5 percent. Legally, rent regulations must be terminated ...
  
  
• April 2012 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings soldLloyd Goldman closed on the retail component of glassy condominium tower Yves Chelsea at 166 West 18th Street. He paid $6.6 million for the space, which is currently the headquarters of brokerage Core NYC. It was asking $7 million.Graves Hospitality and KSK Construction announced today that they completed the sale of the Hotel Williamsburg to King & Grove Hotels for $33 million. King & Grove, the Manhattan-based boutique hotel chain backed by the Chetrit Group paid $520,000 per key at the 64-room hotel.Cayre family’s Midtown Equities closed on the property and will bring a Whole Foods to ...
  
  
• March 2012 New York New Developments
• New Developments There are thousands of acres of rooftop space in New York City where growing farm operations are looking to expand. Groups such as Gotham Greens, Brooklyn Grange and BrightFarms are looking for elevated space where they can grow crops to sell to local restaurants and supermarketsSheldon Solow outdueled his West 57th Street rival and acquired an office building on the block at a near record price. Solow, bid $120 million for 12 West 57th Street to beat out One57 developer Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development, for the 12-story property. The price works out to more than $1,400 ...
  
  
• February 2012 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale The Sapir Organization, the developer of Manhattan's Trump Soho, is planning to put the hotel and its unsold condominium units on the auction block. The auction will likely take place later in the spring.Aby Rosen's RFR Holding is in contract to buy back the debt for far less than the $144.2 million face value at the Midtown development site at 610 Lexington Avenue.Although the vacant property, where Rosen sought to build the Shangri-La Hotel, New York, is in contract to RFR Holding. Several more properties in the William Gottlieb estate have hit the sales market, encouraging ...
  
  
• February 2012 New York New Developments
• New York Major Developments The 226-room Courtyard Marriott on East 92nd Street may close this spring, in the wake of two years of legal battles, including a lawsuit against Marriott International. It is scheduled to lay off 59 employees by March 30. Having already ceded some of its demand to recent upstart office markets like Midtown South and downtown Manhattan, Midtown East is the subject of a Department of City Planning review intending to probe whether it needs to incentivize commercial property upgrades in the area Midtown East has more than 70 million square feet of office space, 13 Fortune ...
  
  
• January 2012: Manhattan Buildings For Sale
• Manhattan Buildings For Sale The 12,083-square-foot parcel, is for sale which is right now home to a seven-story, mixed-use loft building, also comes with air rights from nearby properties. The buildings at 146-148 West 28th Street and parking lot at 140-144 West 28th Street offer 170,000 feet of buildable space. A prime Midtown East development site at 249-53 East 50th is for sale with approximately 44,000 buildable square feet and 55 feet of frontage between Second and Third avenues. A free-standing retail building near Columbia University's Manhattanville campus is for sale for $11 million. The 18,200-square-foot, rectangular building at 701 ...
  
  
• January 2012: Manhattan City New Developments
• Manhattan New Developments Cornell University, in partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology will build a 2 million-square-foot applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. Atlantic Philanthropies a charitable organization founded by billionaire Charles Feeney made the $350 million gift to go towards the creation of Cornell University's 2 million-square-foot applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. Feeney, who made billions of dollars through co-founding the Duty Free Shoppers Group, graduated from Cornell's School of Hotel Management in 1956, and has been consistently making donations to his alma mater.Brooklyn politicians were still hoping on another phrase the mayor uttered ...
  
  
• December 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale A Times Square Hotel, the 47-room Hotel 41 at 206 West 41st Street, will be auctioned Dec. 5, after lender Crane, A.G., a 50 percent owner of the hotel, filed to foreclose on developer Benjamin Soleimani's interest in the property. The 11,562-square-foot Hotel 41 building, on a side street just below Times Square, was purchased by Soleiman's 206 West 41st Street Hotel Associates in 2008 and underwent a complete transformation by architect Andrew Pollack and Soleimani with ultra-modern interiors. ATCO is selling the Atlas Terminals, an industrial park adjacent to the Atlas Park mall it developed ...
  
  
• December 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments Local 32BJ, the union representing more than 22,000 commercial building workers in New York City, voted to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike if necessary. The union has been in contract talks with the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, since November 15th. The union opposes the landlords' proposal to establish a different wage and benefit structure for new hires, which they claim will create a two-tier system designed to push out workers with seniority. If negotiations fail by 12:01 am on Jan. 1, 2012, the union could strikeThe Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, which ...
  
  
• November 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings sold Africa Israel USA sold the Clock Tower building at 5 Madison Avenue for $165 million.and close January 2012. The buyer has made a $5 million deposit -- $2 million of which is non-refundable. Savanna formed a partnership with the Feil Organization to purchase the office building 21 Penn Plaza for $137 million. Previously Savanna picked up nearby 31 Penn Plaza for $130 million. It's also acquired 100 Wall Street, 80 Broad Street, 386 Park Avenue South, 104 West 40th Street, 1375 Broadway and 5 Hanover Square through a $550 million real estate investment fund it closed ...
  
  
• November 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments The Chelsea Art Museum located at 556 West 22nd Street is about to be replaced by Hewlett-Packard, which has special plans for the building. HP signed a 10-year lease for the entire 34,500 feet inside the three-story museum building at 556 West 22nd Street near 11th Avenue.. Drastic job and spending cuts are in the cards for 2013 for the New York City construction industry, according to a report released today by the New York Building Congress entitled "New York City Construction Outlook 2011-2013." Construction spending is expected to total $27.7 billion this year.The average number of construction ...
  
  
• October 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments Time Warner is evaluating its plan to possibly move out of the Time Warner Center and consolidate its operations at new headquarters elsewhere to save costs. Time Warner moved to Columbus Circle in 2004, where it had partnered with Related Companies to build the building that is its company headquarters now. Many of its leases, including ones for more than 2 million square feet of space in Midtown, will expire as soon as 2017 and 2018. Since not many buildings could hold all of Time Warner's 6,000 employees in the city, possible alternative options would be Hudson Yards, ...
  
  
• September 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale The Apthorp JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are two of the banks among the final candidates that bid for parts of $9.65 billion in U.S. property loans owned by Anglo Irish Bank. The lenders are interested in acquiring pieces of the $4.52 billion of performing loans. Investor groups led by private-equity firms Blackstone Group, together with Deutsche Bank, and Lone Star Funds also submitted offers for parts of the portfolio, which includes $5.13 billion of subperforming and non-performing debt. Anglo Irish aims to sell off its loans after it was seized by the Irish government in ...
  
  
• September 2011 New York New Developments
• Major NYC Developments The London-based Children's Investment Fund inked its first New York City real estate investment this month, providing $250 million in first mortgages for Macklowe Properties' condominium conversion of the luxury apartment building 737 Park Avenue in Lenox Hill. The fund, makes investments in a wide range of industries globally, and gives a portion of its profits to children's charities around the world. "It is the first direct real estate investment we have made in New York," New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is hindering federal efforts to negotiate a foreclosure settlement with Wall Street banks on ...
  
  
• August 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For Sale 397-401 East 8th Street a development site is on the market for $5.2 million, EV Grieve. Chang's McSam Hotel Group purchased the 4,324-square-foot vacant lot, at 397-401 East 8th Street, for $4.9 million site. Chang appears to be in the midst of a selling spree -- he recently unloaded stalled hotel project sites in the Financial District and in Union Square, as well as his new Holiday Inn Express at 126 Water Street. A month after merging with EBSCO Publishing, library reference publisher H.W. Wilson has decided to market its former headquarters and nearby land holdings ...
  
  
• July 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings sold Newly landmarked 70 Pine sells for $205M to Nathan Berman's Metro Loft Management, or $186 per square foot,. Metro signed on to buy the 1.1 million-square-foot tower, the fifth tallest in the city at 66 stories, from Kumho Investment Bank of South Korea. Kumho previously purchased the building, along with 72/74 Wall Street, from AIG for $150 million.. The Henry T. Sloane mansion at 18 East 68th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues, sold at auction yesterday to its only bidder -- Alexander Rovt, a Ukrainian-born billionaire fertilizer magnate -- for $40 million, the amount in ...
  
  
• July 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments Governor Andrew Cuomo, signed a statewide property tax cap legislation, caps property tax increases at 2 percent, or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. Only a 60 percent vote in local communities override Cuomo's legislation. "We are beginning a new era in which New York will no longer be the tax capital of the nation," Cuomo said Community activists opposing the Rudin family's proposed takeover of the St. Vincent's Hospital campus in Greenwich Village dropped their court appeal without ever appearing before a judge.New York led a second consecutive month of U.S. housing price gains. Nationwide home ...
  
  
• July 2011 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• New York City saw almost no job growth in May. The revised gain for May was 10,200 jobs, putting the year-to-date gain at 42,300, up from 38,900 jobs a month earlier. The flat result should be viewed only a small "bump in the road" to recovery rather than a negative shift in momentum. The biggest losses, 2,800 jobs, were in health services. The real estate and hotel sectors added zero jobs.Stephen Ross' Related Companies is currently in talks with nine prospective tenants for its Hudson Yards development, each seeking more than one million square feet of space. Ross said he'll ...
  
  
• June 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments Companies such as Boston Properties and Vornado Realty Trust are in negotiations with potential tenants and may even proceed with construction without securing leases. Boston Properties may be the first to break ground by the end of 2011. The company is finalizing negotiations to anchor a 1 million-square-foot tower at Eighth Avenue and 55th StreetRelated Companies CEO Stephen Ross said he was confident about attracting tenants for the first phase of the development, which will include four million square feet of office space. "I think we're going to surprise people," he said. "We're talking to nine tenants at ...
  
  
• May 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings sold Joseph Sitt's Thor Equities and developer Joseph Moinian have completed the long awaited deal to buy out Goldman Sachs at 245 Fifth Avenue for $162 million. The property, near 28th Street, had been up for sale since January, when Moinian and his previous venture partner, Goldman Sachs Whitehall Funds, decided to put the building up for sale through Eastdil Secured. The property was originally purchased for $190 million, or $620 a square foot, at the height of the market in 2007.RXR Realty purchased the Starrett-Leigh building at 601 West 26th Street for $900 million from Shorenstein ...
  
  
• May 2011 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• The Manhattan office vacancy rate increased in the first quarter of 2011 even as employment in the professional sector rose at the fastest rate since 2000. There were 11,500 new office workers in the first three months of this year. The first-quarter vacancy rate rose even as employment moved up because, large blocks of space being added to the market from tenants who signed relocation deals last year, and because many firms have excess space for their new hires.New York City office rentals got more expensive in the first quarter of 2011, even as vacancy and absorption rates remained mostly ...
  
  
• May 2011 New York New Developments
• Major Developments Mall of America developer Triple Five has reached a deal with lenders and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's administration to reboot and expand the stalled Xanadu complex in the Meadowlands,. The checkered, 2.4 million-square-foot complex, originally envisioned as a retail and entertainment destination that would rejuvenate East Rutherford, has sat incomplete along the New Jersey Turnpike for years, sapping up $1.9 billion in the process and developing a reputation as the poster child for failed boom-time real estate projects.Real estate investment firms Savanna and Monday Properties are launching a $30 million capital improvement for a 20-story, 260,000-square-foot commercial ...
  
  
• April 2011 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings sold Host Hotels & Resorts closed on the $313.5 million sale of the New York Helmsley Hotel, which will be reflagged under the Westin Hotels & Resorts brand in mid-2012 after an extensive renovation. Host Hotels, will renovate the hotel, at 212 East 42nd Street, with a complete overhaul of its 775 guest rooms as well as a meeting space upgrade.Dune Real Estate Partners has agreed to pay $190 million for Anglo Irish Bank's mortgage loan on the embattled Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side. The note, which had a face value of around $300 million, ...
  
  
• April 2011 New York New Developments
• Major Trends Bruce Ratner wants to construct the world's tallest prefabricated structure at the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn, according to the New York Times. The 34-story proposed tower would include 400 affordable apartment units, fulfilling a promise Ratner made when he took over the site. The annual rate of building permits issued for new privately-owned U.S. housing units fell by another 8.2 percent in February to a record-low 517,000, according to the latest data from the Commerce Department, backing up analysts' predictions that a sustained recovery in the housing market is still elusive. The permitting rate, which is indicative ...
  
  
• April 2011 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan's office leasing market is on pace for its best year ever after February brought some 3 million square feet worth of deals,. That's far above the nine-year monthly average of 1.9 million square feet of office leases. The banner month also comes on the heels of a busy January, when 2.6 million square feet were snapped up in Manhattan office lease transactionsManhattan townhouses see 2010 sales uptickBoth the single-family and multi-family Manhattan townhouse markets showed signs of improvement last year, according to the Corcoran Group, which released its first annual Townhouse Report today. In the single-family market, the number ...
  
  
• March 2011 New York New Developments
• Major Trends The laws that cap rent increases on 1 million city apartments expire in June, and landlord groups, tenant advocates and politicians all agree that they should be extended. Last time the laws were up for a renewal, in 2003, Senate Republicans threatened to let them expire and ended up forcing the Democrats to accept a simple renewal. Now the Democrats think they have a better chance of getting a good deal for tenants. The real estate industry is desperate to renew a tax break known as 421-a, which spurs new apartment building development, and Sheldon Silver believes developers ...
  
  
• February 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments Three years after the Related Cos. began developing its 26-acre Hudson Yards project, the company is now trying to find a tenant willing to commit to occupying at least 600,000 square feet of office space. To land its key tenant, Related is offering either to construct a building and sell it to that company or to provide a big break on the rent. The 12 million-square-foot space, bordered by the High Line and the Hudson River, will run from 10th to 12th avenues and from West 30th to 33rd streets. The $15 billion project is expected to take ...
  
  
• January 2011 New York New Developments
• New Developments Columbia University may be moving forward with plans for a $6.3 billion expansion after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by local businesses whose properties may be subject to eminent domain. The justices refused to question findings by a state development agency and said that the area is blighted and that the expansion has a legitimate public purpose. Several years back, retail giant Walmart tried to open stores in Queens and Staten Island, but backed off after fierce community opposition. Now the discount chain store is trying again to break into the New York City market, since ...
  
  
• November 2010 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York City Buildings soldJRK Hotel Group has sold the 193-room Hotel Roger Williams, at 131 Madison Avenue, to LaSalle Hotel Properties. LaSalle acquired the hotel's leasehold interest for $90 million, along with around $4.5 million in other costs which closed recently. JRK, who acquired the property on the corner of 31st Street in 2003, will retain management of the hotel. Embattled developer Kent Swig lost ownership of 5 Hanover Square after Manhattan-based real estate firm Savanna bought the discounted mortgage on the 325,000-square-foot building. Savanna paid $51.5 million in cash to Capital One Bank, a 14 percent discount from ...
  
  
• October 2010 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Overall asking rent for Manhattan office space climbed slightly to $47.73 per square foot in August, up from $47.57 per square foot in July. The vacancy rate in Manhattan also showed modest improvement, dropping gradually month-over-month to 13.4 percent, from 13.7 percent. Compared to August 2009, vacancy was down .5 percent. Of all the boroughs prime office neighborhoods, the Downtown market struggled the most showing its slowest leasing momentum since September 2009, as the vacancy rate remained steady at 14.3 percent. Midtown, however, showed promise: 10.55 million square feet has been leased so far this year, up 56 percent from ...
  
  
• August 2010 New York New Developments
• New Developments Community Board 7 voted to disapprove Extell's plans for an eight-acre Riverside Center project, unless the developer agrees to build according to some modifications. The plan for the new development that would span 59th to 61st street and West End Avenue to the edge of the West Side Highway includes five skyscrapers, at least 2,500 apartments, 210,000 square feet of retail, a hotel, a movie theater, an underground automobile service center, a new K-8 school and three acres of open space. The Alex is facing an $81.7 million foreclosure suit after Anglo Irish Bank sold the note on ...
  
  
• July 2010 New York New Developments
• New York Developments The closure of St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village dominated the news, neighborhood institution succumbing to financial troubles. Despite the credit crunch, New York-area hospitals are finding ways to fund major expansion projects. Through the support of philanthropists, often from the real estate sector, there's funding to build state-of-the-art health care institutions, keeping New York a world leader in health care. The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey yesterday approved an agreement with the city, under which the city will reimburse the agency up to $44 million for building underground foundations and infrastructure for a ...
  
  
• May 2010 New York New Developments
• New Developments Of the many players featured in the high-stakes drama unfolding at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, David Tepper, who has bought more than $800 million worth of controlling bonds at the property over the last 18 months, is proving to be one of the most volatile and polarizing. Tepper took legal action to guide the distressed property to his liking. But his attitude toward Stuyvesant Town, one of the biggest commercial-deals-gone-sour, is one of optimism. Tepper sees an opportunity for bankruptcy and restructuring, a move he believes would save millions. The city's Economic Development Corp. issued two ...
  
  
• April 2010 New York New Developments
• New Developments The number of small- to mid-size medical and bio-pharmacy companies in the city has quadrupled to 120 from 2002, due to the city's recruitment and the accessibility of academic centers in the area. The Upper East Side girls' prep school has cancelled its expansion into the nearby apartment building. The Brearley School, at 610 East 83rd Street, had been angling to buy half the building at 85 East End Avenue, for use as additional teaching space but has fallen through. Extended Stay Hotels may accept a $905 million investment offer from Starwood Capital Group and associated investors in ...
  
  
• March 2010 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• The high volume of commercial leasing in recent months, fueled in part by tenants signing early renewals at sharply reduced prices, could come back to bite the market next year. Tenants with two and three years remaining on their leases and sometimes even four years are signing renewals early.The vacancy rate for Midtown Class A office space fell last month to its lowest level since the first quarter of 2009. The Midtown Class A vacancy rate was 14.3 percent in January, down from 14.7 percent in December. At the same time, asking rents for Class A space in Midtown were ...
  
  
• March 2010 New York New Developments
• Major Developments Affordable housing programs throughout the city are facing trouble unloading units. The city has been praised across the country for its efforts to provide affordable housing to lower- and middle-income households but, while the low-income rentals continue to thrive, the ownership program is struggling, which could be seen as good since it ultimately means less foreclosures.Larry Silverstein believes his commitment to the World Trade Center redevelopment project can be measured not only by his enthusiasm, but also by his own cash. The developer recently proposed several different financing options to the Port Authority of New York & New ...
  
  
• February 2010 New York New Developments
• New Developments The year-end review of Manhattan commercial real estate casts doubt on 2010's outlook. Commercial property sales volume was weak through the end of 2009, with projections suggesting that the total volume for the year was just $5.7 billion, a decline from $23.6 billion in 2008 and $62.8 billion in 2007.Manhattan commercial property sales volume remained slow through the end of 2009. Total commercial property sales for the year were just $5.5 billion, down from the peak level of $62.8 billion in 2007, and less than a third of the total sales made in 2008. There is pent-up energy ...
  
  
• February 2010 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Last year was miserable for New York investment sales with below $7 billion in deals for all property types in the metropolitan area, down from $77 billion in 2007 and $26 billion in 2008. The dearth in sales means Manhattan no longer sits as the No. 1 market. It is not even in the top 10 of all property types, down to No. 13.New leasing activity in Midtown jumped by 34 percent in December from the prior month, ending the year with an annual volume of the 2008 level yet despite the strong leasing levels, average asking rents continued to ...
  
  
• January 2010 New York Buildings For Sale
• Manhattan Buildings sold SL Green recently purchased the construction loan on Harry Macklowe's 510 Madison Avenue, a major step toward taking control of the new 350,000-square-foot office tower. The $185 million in outstanding debt was purchased from Union Labor Life Insurance for $170 million. Now, SL Green will have to fund $30 million in unfinished work, plus foot a $30 to $40 million bill for a reserve for tenant improvement allowances and brokers' commissions. The building's only tenants so far are investment firm Jay Goldman and watch retailer Tourneau, both of which are embroiled in battles to renege on their ...
  
  
• January 2010 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• New leasing velocity improved in Manhattan last month, average asking rents continued to fall. Leasing activity rose to its highest level in three months to 1.78 million square feet as landlords dropped average asking rents last month by $0.73 to $49.17/RSF. The highest vacancy rate in Class A buildings in Midtown was in the Columbus Circle submarket at 17.6 %. In Midtown South, the neighborhood with the highest Class A vacancy rate was Chelsea, at 19.4 %, and Downtown, the Financial District had the highest rate, at 10.9 %. In Manhattan office buildings, Class A asking rents were $59.72 per ...
  
  
• January 2010 New York New Developments
• New Developments Mort Zuckerman, chairman and CEO of Boston Properties, discussed his outlook on commercial real estate and whether the national recovery is on its way. While he was somewhat pessimistic about the industry as a whole, there are some pockets of the country that are moving toward stabilization. The industry in general is in a fairly weakened condition. In the major cities the commercial real estate is doing reasonably well but in the minor cities they are having more difficulty.Hudson River Park, the five-mile waterfront band stretching from Battery Park to 59th Street, is short on cash and may ...
  
  
• December 2009 New York Buildings For Sale
• Manhattan Buildings sold The Volkswagen Group of America has purchased the 265,000-square-foot Potamkin General Motors building at 798-804 11th Avenue between 55th and 56th streets. The space was purchased for $84 million with plans to renovate through a $41 million investment, and will be used as the flagship Manhattan dealership for Audi and Volkswagen. The 24,700-square-foot retail space in the St. Regis New York was sold to a three-way partnership of property managers for $117 million. GFC Fifth Avenue is comprised of Crown Acquisitions, Goldman Properties and the Feil Organization, and they bought the property, located at 2 East 55th ...
  
  
• December 2009 New York New Developments
• New Developments Commercial lenders did not throw out all of their standards in the recent cycle of easy credit. When developer Aby Rosen structured his $133 million loan for the acquisition and development of the Shangri-La hotel at 614 Lexington Avenue in 2007, the mortgage document included a personal guaranty to cover losses in the event of a default. Similarly, when Kent Swig negotiated $49 million in loans with Lehman Brothers Holdings to develop a hotel and condo project at 45 Broad Street in the Financial District in 2006 and 2007, the bank demanded a similar guaranty in the mortgage ...
  
  
• November 2009 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Building sales for the first three quarters of the year are down 92% in Manhattan compared to the same period in 2007. Sales totaled $3.2 billion in the first nine months of 2009, a sharp decline compared to the same time in 2007, when there were $40 billion in investment sales. In the first three quarters of 2008, there were $18 billion in sales. The situation has improved on the building sales front. The number of sales in Manhattan jumped 270 percent in the third quarter of 2009 to $1.2 billion compared to the quarter earlier when there were $338 ...
  
  
• November 2009 New York New Developments
• Major NYC Developments 11 Times Square, the city's largest office tower, remains entirely unleased more than two years after breaking ground in 2007. Some give the owner little chance of holding on to the 1 million-square-foot building without a significant debt restructuring. They cite the current weak economy, the 25 percent decline in rents, and the cost of the building, a pricey $1,100 per square foot as the reason. There are currently no signed leases for the 40-story glass commercial tower stationed across from the Port Authority terminal, which is three-quarters completed.JPMorgan Chase may hold onto its 60-story office property ...
  
  
• October 2009 New York New Developments
• Major Developments Stalled construction projects are not having much of a psychological impact on the city. Despite an increasing number of delayed projects, including 250 West 55th Street, 99 Church Street and Solow's First Avenue project, any psychological effects are likely to be short-lived, because the projects will be completed eventually. Large banks are only about halfway done with their commercial real estate losses. The U.S. commercial real estate losses could reach 10 or 15 percent of loans in this cycle. Banks with retail and office loans face the highest risk.The Plaza hotel is on tough times. The building's lower ...
  
  
• September 2009 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Manhattan's office rents are declining more sharply than those in other U.S. markets, though it's probably due to a soaring multi-year run-up. Average Manhattan asking rents were $60.23 per square foot, down from $71.59 a year ago, or an almost 16 percent plummet. Midtown leasing velocity beat its five-year average for the first time in 18 months while the availability rate of office space improved slightly for only the second time since late 2007. There was 1.58 million square feet leased in Midtown in July,up from 1 million in June, besting its 60-month average of 1.32 million square feet. The ...
  
  
• September 2009 New York New Developments
• New Developments New building permits issued in the first five months of 2009 showed a year-over-year drop in all five boroughs for the second year in a row. Citywide, permits were down 48.5 percent from the same period last year to 720, and were down 69 percent from the first half of 2007, when the building boom was still in full force. Of the five boroughs, Manhattan saw the biggest drop from last year, with 18 building permits filed between January and May, or 72.3 percent fewer than in the same period of 2008. This number was off 71.9 percent ...
  
  
• August 2009 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• This year, leasing activity in Manhattan will likely be the weakest in decades. Expectation is this is going to be the worst year since keeping records on this in the 1980. There has only been 5.9 million square feet leased in Manhattan through July 1, and expects leasing for the year to be worse than the most recent low of 14 million square feet in 1991. Available office space rose to 41.2 million square feet, the highest level in the past four and a half years. The availability rate reached 11.5 percent, up from 10.5 percent at the end of ...
  
  
• August 2009 New York New Developments
• New Developments After many years of construction on Fulton Street, small business owners are now able to apply for grants from the city to improve storefronts that have been obstructed or damaged by the construction. The Fulton Nassau Crossroads Program, funded by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, offers free design, engineering and construction management, along with $275,000 for construction, to buildings located on Fulton and Nassau streets.Law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe may sign a lease for 220,000 square feet at 51 West 52nd Street. They will take the space previously occupied by UBS and Cushman & Wakefield. Cushman will ...
  
  
• July 2009 New York New Developments
• New Developments The Federal Reserve has few deals for the start of its program to aid the commercial real estate market. Today is the first monthly deadline for investors to apply for loans to buy new commercial mortgage-backed securities through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. The Fed will start accepting investor requests for loans to purchase older CMBS.James Abadie, head of New York operations for construction firm Bovis Lend Lease, has resigned amid investigations of the company for alleged overbilling and bribery. Bovis is working on the September 11th Memorial and the demolition of the Deutsche Bank building.Global real ...
  
  
• June 2009 New York New Developments
• New Developments Developers of a Jean Nouvel-designed skyscraper adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art have applied to build a tower seven stories taller than the original proposal unveiled two years ago was 75 stories tall. The building has been controversial, with Community Board 5 criticizing its height and bulk in a resolution in March 2008. The mixed-use project from Houston-based international developer Hines Interests will have 100 hotel rooms and 120 condominium units on the upper floors, and also include a 60,000-square-foot expansion of MoMa's galleries on the second to the fifth floors. The amount of space for the ...
  
  
• April 2009 New York Buildings For Sale
• Manhattan Buildings sold Real estate investor Robert Gans bought the closed Scores West building at 533-535 West 27th Street for $9.58 million. The 10,000-square-foot venue closed when its license was revoked. The asking price for the building, between 10th and 11th avenues, was to be around $40 million.The New York Times Company and W. P. Carey & Co., an investment management company, entered into a $225 million sale-leaseback transaction for space at the Times' Manhattan headquarters. The sale-leaseback involves 750,000 square feet over 21 floors of the 52-story building on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st streets. The lease extends ...
  
  
• March 2009 New York Buildings For Sale
• New York Buildings For Sale The Lower East Side building 217 East Houston Street, at Essex Street, is on the market for $6.5 million. The five-story building has a club on the ground floor. Its lease extends until 2018 and the club pays $20,000 per month in rent, with a 3.5 percent annual increase.The sale of Starrett City has been put on hold because the owner of the Brooklyn complex, Starrett City Associates, and federal housing officials have been unable to agree on the fair market value of future rents. Starrett City Associates had initially expected to select a winning ...
  
  
• March 2009 New York New Developments
• The New York State Appellate Division ruled in favor of the Atlantic Yards project today in a lawsuit that challenged the project's environmental review process. Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a statement in support of the project, saying it will "create thousands of jobs and generate badly needed tax revenue." Bloomberg said the court's approval is a big step towards the start of construction for the delayed project.Proskauer Rose backed out of taking space at Mort Zuckerman's 250 West 55th Street, and now is in talks to move in again. Zuckerman put the 1 million-square-foot project on hold when the law ...
  
  
• January 2009 New York New Developments
• New Developments Lenders are going into bankruptcy and the sales market is disappearing, causing developers all over New York to face choices about how to ride out this down cycle.Over $400 billion in mortgages on commercial properties, including office towers and shopping malls, are to come due by the end of 2009. Even if these properties are performing well, they could go into foreclosure if mortgage holders are unable to pay off the loans. The commercial real estate market has shifted from property sales toward the purchase and sale of debt, where the loan, rather than the actual real estate, ...
  
  
• December 2008 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• Asking rents in Class A office buildings in Manhattan declined while vacancies rose to their highest level since March 2006. Rents were down 5.6 percent to $83.38 from the May 2008 high of $88.37. Total vacancies were up 29 percent from the start of the year to 8 percent, or 18.4 million square feet. The last time so much was available was March 2006 when vacancies hit 18.2 million square feet. There was 4.4 million square feet of sublease available in Midtown Class A properties, which made up 28.2 percent of all available Class A in the area. As vacancy ...
  
  
• December 2008 New York New Developments
• New DevelopmentsRecently, banks have begun lending to one another, signifying a slight thaw in credit markets. Yet, the commercial real estate market still seems limited in its ability to get financing. This inability to line up financing has scuttled some major building and lease sales in the past few months, one such example is 17 State Street in the Financial District.About 150,000 jobs have been cut at major financial institutions, and more layoffs may be on the way. Some firms may shed an additional 5 percent of jobs this year if the market doesn't turn around. Citibank has cut 22,000 ...
  
  
• December 2008 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For SaleThe site of the former Drake Hotel on Park Avenue between 56th and 57th streets has six bidders, down from more than 20 bidders, including Larry Silverstein, the Related Companies and Apollo Real Estate Partners. Macklowe Properties has been assembling the site over the last decade, but now is facing foreclosure on the property. At the height of the market, the land, which can support up to 600,000 square feet, could have been purchased for $1,300 a buildable foot, but now will probably sell for less than half of that price.Real estate firm George Comfort & Sons ...
  
  
• November 2008 New York New Developments
• New DevelopmentsIn the last few days, banks have begun lending to one another, signifying a thaw in credit markets that have been frozen for weeks. But despite those promising signs, a chill still seems to be pervading the commercial real estate market. The inability to line up financing has scuttled some major building and lease sales in the past few months, one such example is 17 State Street in the Financial District.With Lehman Brothers locked in bankruptcy, many real estate firms do not have financing to complete construction, meet lease obligations or pay vendors to complete sales, raising the prospect ...
  
  
• October 2008 New York New Developments
• New DevelopmentsThe Bush administration proposed granting the Treasury Department the ability to buy up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets from private firms. The proposal would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. The government also put together a plan that makes investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley holding companies, giving them access to Federal Reserve Bank of New York funds and putting them under stricter regulations. Boutique firms, like Lazard and Evercore Partners, are seizing clients and staff from fallen rivals. Nationwide, financial companies have announced 103,000 layoffs this year. Democrats proposed taxpayers could receive an ...
  
  
• August 2008 New York Buildings For Sale
• NYC Buildings For SaleStarrett City's bidders have been narrowed down to four finalists. Bids for the 46-tower Brooklyn complex were between $600 million and $1 billion, and government officials and Starrett City Associates are expected to choose the new owner by Sept. 1. Starrett City's 140 acres near Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn have retail space, a power plant, a sports center, office space, parking garages and vacant land.Large LeasesBurberry is in negotiation for offices at 444 Madison Avenue, for 68,448 square feet. The asking rent is around $85 per square foot. Burberry is also planning a ground-floor retail store.The world's ...
  
  
• July 2008 New York New Developments
• New DevelopmentsThe city has reached a deal with a developer that will bring schools to a mixed-use development planned for Midtown East. With financing from New York City Educational Construction Fund, the World Wide Group will build a new elementary school and a new high school that would replace the High School for Art and Design. In exchange, the city will lease the developer a 1.5-acre site at East 57th Street and Second Avenue. World Wide plans to build 200,000 square feet of retail and 488,000 square feet of residential space. Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a plan to rejuvenate the ...
  
  
• February 2008 New York New Developments
• New DevelopmentsNew York City's office market has gained on the world's two most expensive cities, London and Hong Kong. London vaulted over Hong Kong to become the world's priciest office market with rent for Class A hitting $265 per square foot. The peak rate in New York City's Midtown reached $225 per square foot. The next most expensive U.S. office markets were San Francisco, with a rate of $110 per square foot; Boston, with a rate of $90 per square foot; and Manhattan's Downtown, with a rate of $65 per square foot. Steven Witkoff, Developer, pulled bid to develop Pier ...
  
  
• January 2008 New York Commercial Real Estate Market Report
• There are 9,072,684 RSF of office space under construction and more office space contemplated and many additional office buildings contemplated. The big question is which will Wall Street and hedge funds start will lay off and how much will they lay and whether the other firms will go back to buisness as usual? Stay tuned.
  
  
• January 2008 New York New Developments
• New DevelopmentsNew Construction BrooklynAt 75 Flatbush Avenue, a permit to build a 21-story, 108-unit new Flatiron has been issued. The 150,000-square-foot building, which is going up Extension will be 262 feet tall.Developers of the Domino Sugar Refinery, a historic landmark, will be part of an ambitious $1.2 billion, 10-year residential development project.Major Market News Columbia Expansion Approved. The City Council voted to rezone a 35-acre section of Harlem, allowing Columbia University's $7 billion expansion. Columbia plans to expand onto 17 of the rezoned acres, bounded by Broadway, Riverside Drive, West 129th Street and West 133rd Street.The Federal Reserve's proposal to ...