The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

The head of Sapir Corp. has snagged a seven-bedroom townhouse in Chelsea, but he won’t be living in it. Alex Sapir, through a limited liability corporation, dropped about $12.7 million on a six-story mansion with its own basement pool at 253 West 18th Street, property records filed Tuesday show. Sapir, who recently moved to South Florida, bought the home for a family member, a source said. A message left with Sapir, whose publicly traded Sapir […]

Michele Mahl has joined JLL’s hotels team, the firm announced. Mahl comes to JLL from Newmark Knight Frank, where she worked in the lodging capital markets group. In her new role at JLL, she will report to Jeffrey Davis, co-head of hotel capital markets in the Americas, and focus on spearheading sales of resort and full-service hotels. She previously was a member of the hotels team at Eastdil Secured. She has been involved with more than […]

Mack-Cali copes with activist attack after $264M Jersey City deal Boston-based AEW Capital Management closed last week on the $263.8 million sale of a 377-unit apartment building in Jersey City to Mack-Cali Realty, The Real Deal reported. HFF, a brokerage poised to be absorbed by JLL in a $2 billion deal, marketed the Soho Lofts property exclusively for AEW and procured the buyer in Mack-Cali, a Jersey City-based real estate investment trust that recently closed […]

IWG, the world’s largest flexible-office provider, is now turning to McDonald’s for inspiration on how to ward off competition from WeWork. The Swiss firm, which has about 555,000 workstations globally, is planning to roll out the franchise model pioneered by McDonald’s back in the 1950s in a bid to accelerate its growth, according to The Wall Street Journal. Through its brands Regus and Spaces, the company builds out spaces in commercial office buildings, and subleases […]

One block away from the Related Companies’ luxury condominium project 70 Vestry, home to the likes of Tom Brady and Lewis Hamilton, sits an empty lot that was supposed to be home to a luxury hotel from France’s Groupe Lucien Barrière. Related has nothing to do with that project… or do they? The partners behind the development at 456 Greenwich Street, which filed for bankruptcy last month, have requested a legal examination of Ponte Equities […]

Just weeks after leasing up the final chunk of Condé Nast’s old space, the Durst Organization has sewed up a $900 million refinancing for 4 Times Square. The money comes from JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, according to Commercial Observer. It recapitalizes the building at 4 Times Square after the maturation of $650 million in commercial mortgage-backed securities financing from UBS Bank. The new mortgage closed on April 8 and has a term of less […]

A pair of French billionaires are among those who are pledging hundreds of millions of euros to rebuild the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE – a major investor in Miami’s Design District – said his family and the luxury-goods company it controls would donate 200 million euros, or the equivalent of about $226 million, while billionaire François-Henri Pinault said his family would […]

New owners may soon be checking into the NoMad Hotel. The hotel’s mezzanine lender, Colony Capital, initiated a UCC foreclosure auction on the 168-key luxury hotel, Commercial Observer reported. The hotel — owned by Andrew Zobler’s Sydell Group and Make It Nice — hasn’t shown any outward signs of of distress, according to the publication. It opened in 2012, and was developed by GFI Development, a partnership between Allen Gross and Andrew Zobler at the […]

 More than a decade after it was first proposed, Columbia University’s massive Manhattanville campus has started to take shape in earnest, with two of the biggest buildings now open: the 450,000-square-foot Jerome L. Greene Science Center at 3227 Broadway and the 60,000-square-foot Lenfest Center for the Arts at 615 West 129th Street. Columbia President Lee Bollinger touted the local benefits of the expansion, which will include about 15 new buildings and an acre of […]

A 120-year-old townhouse owned by a prestigious all-girls school on the Upper East Side has been listed for $32 million. Marymount School of New York, which charges an average annual tuition of $50,000 for kindergarten through 12th grade, listed its five-story, 12,300-square-foot townhouse at 2 East 82nd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. The Corcoran Group’s Carrie Chang, who is representing the seller, could not be immediately reach for comment. Other big-ticket townhouse listings in […]

Nine months after launch, Compass’ commercial division is yet to make its mark on the New York commercial market. Instead, the brokerage says it is spending 2019 “listening to” its commercial agents before charting out the unit’s future. In August, the startup, now valued at $4.4 billion, announced the arrival of its commercial arm, to be led by Eastern Consolidated veterans Adelaide Polsinelli and Robin Abrams. Since then, Polsinelli said the team has grown to […]

Vornado Realty Trust’s Steven Roth is not just one of New York’s top commercial landlords. He is also one of its top collectors of dividends from shares he does not own. Vornado made $463,000 worth of such payments to Roth last year, which equals almost half of his salary, according to Crain’s. Other executives who received money from dividends include AllianceBernstein CEO Seth Bernstein and Philip Morris International CEO André Calantzopoulos. Crain’s identified nine companies […]

Retailers sent out 2018 on an optimistic note, with strong consumer spending and an unexpected comeback of brick-and-mortar stores. But 5,994 stores have closed in the U.S. so far this year, more than last year’s total of 5,864, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from Coresight Research. “I don’t think malls are out of the woods yet,” S&P Global Ratings analyst Ana Lai told the Journal. S&P has a negative outlook on the U.S. […]

Google shelved plans to open its first retail store in a Fulton Market building owned by Newcastle Limited. The tech giant last year was in advanced talks to take the two-story, 14,000-square-foot space at 845-853 West Randolph Street but has called off the deal, according to the Chicago Tribune. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the store plans, and Newcastle officials could not be reached for comment, the Tribune reported. The store would have […]

In 2005, as part of an agreement related to the Hudson Yards rezoning, the city said it would build new affordable housing on the site of the Harborview Terrace parking lot. Fourteen years later, Hudson Yards is open for business, and the parking lot is still there. NYCHA now says plans for the Hell’s Kitchen site, next to a public housing complex between West 54th and West 56th streets, are no longer in the authority’s […]

On a conference call with city officials last year, deputy mayor Alicia Glen voiced displeasure with a proposed bill that would force Airbnb to share data with the city. Nonetheless, City Council passed the bill unanimously, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has since subpoenaed the short-term rental giant for that data. Glen’s inability to persuade City Hall to embrace tech companies like Airbnb reflected a divide between herself and City Hall’s entrenched political forces that […]

Simon Baron Development, a prominent New York landlord and developer, allegedly threatened a rent-regulated tenant at 166 West 75th Street in the Upper West Side, according to a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court last week. Claude and Violaine Galland, who occupy Units 1206 and 1208 in the 16-story property, known as the AMSTRDM, claim that they received a handwritten note with their rent statement that said: “If you love your children, leave the […]

Newly elected Public Advocate Jumaane Williams stopped by The Real Deal’s office on Wednesday to discuss what he hopes to achieve in his latest role and how he plans to navigate its complex and often fraught relationship with the real estate industry. Although the position is infamous in the real estate world for publishing the annual “100 Worst Landlords” list, Williams stressed that he did not see it as his job to be the industry’s […]

Over the course of three head-spinning weeks in January, billionaire Ken Griffin went on what can only be described as a real estate buying binge. First there was a $59 million penthouse on Chicago’s Gold Coast. That was followed by a $122 million mansion overlooking St. James’s Park in London. Then, for the hedge funder’s pièce de résistance, he bought the record-breaking $238 million condo at 220 Central Park South. Griffin obviously isn’t the first […]

Uncertainty over looming changes to rent laws in Albany has chilled the city’s multifamily market. But brokers, ever optimistic, see this as a temporary blip. “I think most people are in a holding pattern until the laws get designed and people figure out what’s going on,” said Steven Vegh, a broker at Westwood Realty Associates. “I think once they pass whatever will pass, it will stabilize.” Changes to New York’s rent laws have been widely […]