The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

Group buys Stamford’s Vineyard Vines building for $34M More than a month after buying a Stamford office building for $163 million, Philadelphia-based Rubenstein Partners has sold another office property in the city for $33.5 million, according to the Stamford Advocate. Rubenstein and New York-based George Comfort & Sons sold 181 Harbor Drive — which serves as the headquarters of the Vineyard Vines clothing company — to a joint venture led by New York-based real estate firms the […]

Adam Neumann has cashed out more than $700 million from the We Company in advance of the company’s initial public offering. It’s not often that private companies publicize such deals ahead of going public, according to the Wall Street Journal, and Neumann’s is one of the largest known such transactions. Startup investors generally do not like it when founders cash out before an IPO, as it can raise questions about how confident they are in […]

This month, The Real Deal ranked the top 50 residential brokers in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. Check out the chart below: Source: TRD analysis of closed sales on LavaMaps, StreetEasy and from firms. Includes Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn residential sales (apartments and townhouses with no commercial/retail component) that were closed in 2018. Only sell-side deals counted. Townhouses include single-family houses or properties marketed as such. For deals with more than one listing agent/team at the same firm, the […]

First Bruce Willis. Then Glenn Close. And now Catherine-Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas. The Hollywood power couple, having just listed their Bermuda compound for $10.6 million last month and slashed the price on their Majorca mansion in May to $32.38 million, could become the next celebrities to bid adieu to Bedford Corners. The New York Post reported that Zeta-Jones and Douglas are in contract to sell their 13.28-acre estate at 44 West Patent Road to Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt, […]

New York landlord Zev Pollak refused to let African Americans rent at one of his Brooklyn properties, maintaining that he was managing a “Jewish building,” according to a new federal lawsuit filed by the Fair Housing Justice Center. The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, accuses Pollak, his company ZP Realty Capital and his employee Eldina Balic of engaging in housing discrimination at 1411 Avenue N, […]

The Financial District’s sales market is seeing an uptick amid bigger price discounts. Sales were up 33 percent in the second quarter, according to Platinum Properties’ Q2 report, compared to the previous quarter. That’s up nearly 17 percent compared to the same period last year. Platinum’s managing partner Teresa Stephenson said the drive behind the increased numbers wasn’t the rush to close before the new taxes went into effect; instead, it was the fact the […]

There’s a funny footnote to Stephen Ross’ decision to put his Time Warner Center penthouse on the market this week for $75 million. The Related Companies founder and chairman didn’t pay a dollar for it — at least not in the traditional sense. Sources said the penthouse was a “distribution” from the project’s development team — a partnership between Related and AREA Property Partners, which was founded by the Mack family and Apollo Global Management. […]

Blackstone Group’s earnings declined over the past three months as distributable earnings from the firm’s real estate segment fell by nearly a quarter from the same time last year. The firm’s overall net income for the second quarter of the year fell to $305.8 million, or 45 cents per share, a significant decline from the $742 million a year ago, executives announced on the company’s earnings call Thursday morning. At the same time, distributable earnings […]

Like other taxi moguls who owned the properties where they parked their fleets, Victor Weingarten parlayed the wealth he made in the yellow cab business into another booming industry: real estate investment. Weingarten, who accumulated so many medallions starting in the 1970s with his brother and cousin that they became known as the Three Wise Men, is also a real estate investor in New York City and beyond. But as the well-documented troubles in the […]

Millions of people flock to Apple stores every day, and most are familiar with the stores’ signature layout and aesthetic. What’s lesser known, though, is that many of these stores contain a private “boardroom,” complete with carefully curated furniture from some of the world’s top designers. The boardroom concept was announced by Apple’s former Retail SVP Angela Ahrendts in May 2016. Today, there are about three dozen stores around the world that were either built […]

An appellate court has ruled that the owner of a long-term ground lease at the site of a controversial Two Bridges development should have a say in how the land is used. The owner, Little Cherry LLC, has 25 years left on a ground lease at the 235 Cherry Street site, according to The City. They have so far refused to give consent to the development, which calls for constructing a 1,000-foot tower above the […]

Colony Capital has sold a massive four-property industrial portfolio in the Inland Empire, the latest indication it is looking to sell its entire industrial holdings. Colony sold a 745,580-square-foot portfolio in Rancho Cucamonga to Lincoln Property Company for $104.6 million. CBRE, which represented Colony, announced the deal Wednesday. The buyer, Lincoln Property, recently put a sprawling office campus on the market for sale. Dubbed Campus @ Warner Center, the property is on the market for […]

After unloading his renovated pad at the Plaza, Mexican billionaire Juan Beckmann Vidal has snagged a new home. The tequila mogul bought a condo at Extell Development’s 1010 Park Avenue for $24.9 million days before New York’s new taxes went into effect, according to public records. Beckmann Vidal is the chairman and majority owner of the tequila brand José Cuervo. According to Forbes, his net worth is around $5 billion. His new unit was bought […]

With New York recently pushing through rent reforms that have turned the city’s real estate world on its head, some firms are eagerly touting multifamily investment opportunities in other markets. CBRE announced last week its hire of Sam Zell. No, not the billionaire real estate investor, but the former vice president at Tel Aviv-based investment firm Buligo Capital Partners. After 12 years of working on the buy side, Zell will now oversee CBRE’s multifamily capital markets team […]

Prewar. Park Avenue. Spacious. The four-bedroom co-op with a beamed ceiling and library on the Upper East Side seemed to check a lot of boxes. But buyers yawned. First listed in 2014 for nearly $13 million, the unit at 941 Park Avenue sat unsold as the market weakened. Then, in 2016, Douglas Elliman’s Lauren Muss took over the listing and slashed the price to $9.5 million. But that still didn’t do the trick. Finally, two […]

Real estate attorneys and lobbyists believe two landlord groups’ constitutional challenge to New York’s rent regulations could ultimately eliminate the practice of rent stabilization altogether. To that, tenant groups say: fat chance. Senator Julia Salazar, who led the push for Universal Rent Control in the new Democratic Senate, was unfazed by the legal challenge, filed on Monday by the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) and Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) and three of its members. “The […]