The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

LIVWRK, a Brooklyn-based development firm, is making its first foray into Miami commercial real estate, The Real Deal has learned. The company, led by founder and CEO Asher Abehsera, is under contract to buy a 2.5-acre assemblage in Wynwood, according to sources. East End Capital is selling the properties at 2400 and 2500 North Miami Avenue in Miami. LIVWRK will partner with the neighboring property owner at 48 Northwest 25th Street. Robert Given of Cushman

Not everyone’s moving to Florida: A Connecticut hedge fund has inked a new lease in Midtown East. Ellington Management Group signed the lease to take 19,600 square feet on the fifth floor of SL Green Realty’s 711 Third Avenue, the landlord announced. The building, between East 44th and East 45th streets, is a short walk from Grand Central Terminal and has a 165-car parking garage. Founded by Michael Veranos in 1994, Ellington is headquartered in

One of Cushman & Wakefield’s top sales brokers is no longer with the company. Stephen Preuss, who ran the brokerage’s Queens office, was recently terminated, sources told The Real Deal. Preuss did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Cushman confirmed that he no longer works at the company. “I can confirm Stephen Preuss is no longer with Cushman & Wakefield,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We remain heavily committed to

Finally: As of June 1, New Yorkers will be able to apply for the state’s latest round of pandemic rent relief. Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the announcement on Tuesday, a week before applications go live. The launch date just misses the May deadline initially proposed by the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the agency tasked with allocating funds. The state legislature approved the $2.7 billion program in the budget that passed in early April.

During the housing bubble, home prices peaked in July 2006 before plunging to new lows in a crash that endured until 2012. Now, they’re once again reaching new highs. Home prices soared to a 13.2 percent year-over-year gain in March, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index. That’s up from the 12 percent annual gain in February, and marks the 10th consecutive month of accelerating home prices. March’s numbers represent

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are seasoned luxury real estate buyers and sellers, but they appear to have a soft spot for a particular property in Montecito. The couple just paid $14.3 million for a six-acre estate they had sold to Tinder co-founder Sean Rad three years ago for $11 million, according to Dirt. DeGeneres and de Rossi bought Rancho San Leandro at 308 Ennisbrook Drive in September 2017 for $7.2 million. The property,

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office has endorsed a newly announced partnership between two city pension funds and Hudson Companies to develop housing for middle-class families. But the $250 million project’s mix falls short of the affordable housing plans that Stringer and other mayoral hopefuls have campaigned on, proposing rents that housing advocates say misses the mark. Intended to house the working class, the partnership’s plan allots city pension funds to build homes across

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The Shinnecock Nation is planning to build a casino in Southampton. The tribe’s on-again, off-again project is on again, perhaps because a license for a full-fledged downstate casino is up for grabs. The tribe’s Southampton reservation is beyond the state’s control and it needs no permission from New York for the 76,000-square-foot casino it aims to build there. But a license from the state is far more appealing,

A new kind of house flipper has infiltrated low-income neighborhoods, prompting local governments and agencies to enact more restrictive rules on home flippers capitalizing on distressed homes. Instead of buying and renovating homes and putting them back up for sale, wholesalers work to put homes under contract and sell to traditional flippers. However, in the past year, Philadelphia and Oklahoma have required wholesalers to obtain a license, Bloomberg News reported. Arkansas and Illinois passed laws

Multifamily developers are starting to feel the pain of sky-high lumber costs. The price of softwood lumber jumped 83 percent from a year ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from CoStar Advisory Services. That jump has led to an increase in prices for single-family homes, and now it’s trickling down to developers of apartment buildings, too. The costs of materials used in multifamily construction — including lumber, fuel, copper and steel — have

Demand for Brooklyn townhouses rose during the pandemic, but the surge wasn’t merely a Covid-driven trend. Prices for townhouses in the borough have been steadily rising for nearly a decade while the condo and co-op market has remained fairly flat, according to a report from UrbanDigs. The median sale price for Brooklyn townhouses with three or fewer units is now about $1 million, up 85 percent from 2012, when it was $550,000. Condo and co-op

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices is seeing some changes in its C-suite. The company announced that it has appointed Christy Budnick as its new president and CEO. She was most recently the president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Florida Network. Budnick will be leading a brokerage that has more than 50,000 employees and 1,500 offices across the globe. It’s one of the largest brokerages in the world, both in terms of sales volume and

The Time Warner Center is no longer; say hello to the Deutsche Bank Center. Related Companies, the owner of the two-tower complex on Columbus Circle, made the renaming official by adding new signage to the building this week, Commercial Observer reported. The move comes as the German lender prepares to move into its more than 1 million square foot office space later this year. Deutsche Bank will have 5,000 employees in the building. It took

Two New York City pension funds see an opportunity to invest in new housing. The public school teachers’ and municipal employees’ retirement systems will partner with developer Hudson Companies on a joint venture to build middle-income housing in the city and nearby suburbs, Bloomberg News reported. The funds will invest $250 million, the bulk of which will go toward creating new units. About 30 percent will be used to renovate existing units. The pensions will

The techies keep coming. J. Michael Arrington, founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, paid $16 million for a waterfront home in Coral Gables, according to sources. Arrington purchased the property via a land trust. Commercial broker Daniel Hughes, head of the retail firm Metro Commercial, sold the six-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bathroom house on half an acre in Old Cutler Bay. The 7,518-square-foot home, designed by architect Cesar Molina, is near Fairchild Tropical Garden. Arrington co-founded the tech

Four mid-market investment sales recorded last week fetched $63.3 million, led by a bulk condo unit purchase in Queens and another in Brooklyn. The two boroughs had a lock on last week’s other recorded sales in the $10 million to $30 million category. The two prior weeks’ mid-market sales had totaled $103.6 million and $39.6 million. Here are more details on the deals for the week ending May 21. 1. Myles Horn of Glacier Equities,

After more than a year of frustrated efforts in the state court system, Tax Equity Now New York’s latest attempt at property tax reform is an appeal to the federal government. In a letter sent Thursday, the coalition implored the Department of Justice to challenge the city’s tax structure under the Fair Housing Act. The plea comes eight months after the New York Court of Appeals tossed out a TENNY suit challenging the constitutionality of

In 2018, the company that manages the Brooklyn condominium where cybersecurity expert Roman Sannikov lives was hacked. The hacker locked down the property manager’s IT system and demanded the company pay a ransom to get back in. Sannikov, who leads a team of analysts scouring the dark web for intel on cybercrime and hacktivism, wasn’t personally affected by the breach; he pays his maintenance fees the old-fashioned way: by check. But as a member of

In a rebuke of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state lawmakers are seeking to give New York City more control over his Penn Station expansion and new development in the surrounding area. A recently introduced bill would force the project to go through the city’s seven-month land use review process, rather than a state-led General Project Plan that overrides local zoning. In January 2020, Cuomo pitched an expansion of Penn Station that would be funded, in part,