The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

Prologis buying Sunset Park property teed up as new City Harvest HQ

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 03:09 PM PST

Mega warehouse landlord Prologis is buying a property in Sunset Park that will soon be the new headquarters of food-rescue nonprofit City Harvest. The multinational real estate investment trust is buying the two-acre site at 150 East 52nd Street from DH Property Holdings’ Dov Hertz, who secured the site and teed up a deal to bring City Harvest to Brooklyn, sources told The Real Deal. Prologis is paying $60 million to buy the property, which

“It was a disaster”: How a spurned RLS operator upended a REBNY meeting

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 02:59 PM PST

Spurned MLS operator Stratus Data Systems isn’t going quietly into the night. After losing a lucrative contract to power the Real Estate Board of New York’s residential listings service, Stratus sent a cease-and-desist letter to rival listings provider Perchwell, which was tapped last month to operate the RLS’ back-end system. Stratus also sent cease-and-desist letters to the real estate trade organization. And it did so in dramatic fashion. In a made-for-TV moment, electronic copies of

Lawsuit: Toby Moskovits, Michael Lichtenstein owe investor $3M

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 01:15 PM PST

Developers Toby Moskovits and Michael Lichtenstein owe an investor about $3.3 million, he alleges in a lawsuit that suggests they repay him with their stakes in LLCs. Shaul Kopelowitz’s suit says he lent Moskovits and Lichtenstein $6 million and has only received about $3.1 million back. In addition to Moskovits and Lichtenstein, it fingers six LLCs linked to Brooklyn properties at 227 Grand Street, 96 Wythe Avenue (the Williamsburg Hotel), 19 Kent Avenue, 215 Moore

Harbor Group’s 13K-unit apartment purchase is one of largest ever

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 12:45 PM PST

Two years ago, Harbor Group International acquired a 9,600-unit apartment portfolio, paying $1.8 billion for properties across the East Coast and in Chicago. Now, the Virginia-based real estate investment firm has gone even bigger. Harbor has closed on one of the largest apartment portfolio deals ever, paying $1.85 billion for 13,243 units, most of them across the South and Southwest. The portfolio encompasses 36 properties in eight states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New Mexico,

Whatever happened to the city’s largest vacant lots?

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 12:20 PM PST

New York has a housing shortage, yet no shortage of vacant lots. The city cannot compel development on private parcels, but what about all the empty sites belonging to its primary housing agency? That’s what the city comptroller, Scott Stringer, was thinking when he published a report in 2016 highlighting the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s 1,100 unbuilt plots. He followed up in 2018 with an audit that found more than a thousand still

Related drops 700-foot-long “wall” from Hudson Yards plan

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 11:37 AM PST

The writing was on the wall. The Related Companies said Wednesday it would not build what critics had derisively deemed a wall next to the High Line at its Hudson Yards development. The announcement, made in a Twitter post and first reported by Crain’s, came five days after several powerful politicians blasted the idea in a New York Times piece penned by architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. “There has never been a wall along the High

NYC bill would boost rental vouchers for homeless

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 09:00 AM PST

A City Council bill that would raise the amount of money given to people transitioning from homeless shelters to affordable housing is gaining support. The measure, sponsored by Council member Stephen Levin, would boost the value of rental vouchers to federally mandated fair market value, according to the New York Daily News. That would widen the options for tenants in search of affordable housing. Almost three dozen Council members are backing the measure, but Mayor

Bushwick rezoning impasse puts de Blasio’s housing plan at risk

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 08:20 AM PST

A fight over the future of Bushwick could put Mayor Bill de Blasio’s entire housing policy at risk, as opposition to its basic premise — mixed-income housing — seems to be gaining momentum. The Bushwick drama involves a rezoning of the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood that would allow for more residential construction, triggering the mayor’s mandatory inclusionary housing law, which requires a percentage of every residential project to be affordable. The idea is for market-rate units

Tons of apartments will hit the US market this year. They’re for the rich

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 07:30 AM PST

The U.S. apartment market should see more new units in 2020 than in any year since the 1980s, but these pads aren’t for the great unwashed. The country should see 371,000 new rental units this year, a 50 percent increase over last year, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing data from RealPage. Some major cities like Houston and Los Angeles will see more than double the amount of new homes this year than they

Opening Ceremony is the latest Soho retailer to close

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 06:45 AM PST

Yet another Soho retailer is packing up shop as headwinds hit the retail sector. Opening Ceremony, the hip clothing store that has been in Soho for almost two decades at 35 Howard Street and has another location at the Ace Hotel in Koreatown, announced it will close its retail locations. “We are stepping back from multi-brand retail, for a moment, so we can come back with an experience that is just as inspiring,” the retailer

NYC Multifamily building sales plummeted in 2019

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 06:00 AM PST

A clear picture of the effect of rent law reforms on New York’s multifamily housing market has emerged, and it’s not looking good for small and midsize sales. Last year, the number of New York multifamily building transactions valued between $7 million to $75 million dropped 45 percent, from 385 sales in 2018 to 212 sales in 2019, according to the Commercial Observer, citing data from Ackman Ziff. The city’s landlords were dealt a blow

Data Alert! Manhattan office leasing through November 2019

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 05:00 AM PST

Office leasing in Manhattan • Midtown office leasing hit a new all-year high in November with 2,750,000 square feet in leases inked, up 36% from the prior month’s record and up 58% year-over-year. The leasing spurt pushed the availability rate down to 11.3%, while the average asking rent fell by nearly $2 to $87.03, all thanks to the month’s headline deal — Facebook’s 1.5 million-square-foot lease across three buildings at Hudson Yards, which accounted for

Managing the rent law aftershocks

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 04:30 AM PST

Soon after Albany passed its overhaul of the state’s rent law in June, real estate firms with big rent-stabilized holdings took a major hit. Months earlier, David Bistricer’s real estate investment trust Clipper Equity, which owns more than 3,000 regulated units in the city, had presented an ambitious deregulation plan to investors. The firm was aiming to bring its seven-building Flatbush Gardens — which represented 38 percent of the landlord’s holdings at the time —

Two more rent-overcharge lawsuits get class-action status

Posted: 15 Jan 2020 04:00 AM PST

As the future of rent overcharge cases hangs in the balance, two major rent-overcharge cases have attained class certification. A lawsuit alleging that landlord The Scharfman Organization overcharged tenants while receiving J-51 tax benefits at a Washington Heights building received class certification last week. Four days later, a similar case alleging that landlord Chestnut Holdings overcharged more than a hundred tenants at a Hamilton Heights building also received class certification. The two lawsuits were brought

Future City: Silicon Valley is pumping money into Brazilian house-flippers, rocky times for Goldman-backed online mortgage broker Trussle & more

Posted: 10 Jan 2020 01:30 PM PST

Proptech is a $20 billion industry that’s already reshaping and upending traditional real estate as we know it. And this is just the beginning. Each Thursday, The Real Deal’s Future City newsletter breaks down the biggest news in proptech across the globe, from 3-D printer homebuilders in Long Island, to emerging tech brokerages in India, to crowdfunding property startups in San Francisco. Of course, we also cover the intrigue around firms backed by SoftBank. There are lots of them.