The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

It’s only September, but Manhattan’s luxury real estate market has already set an all-time record. Based on the combined asking prices, buyers have signed contracts to purchase $11.4 billion worth of luxury homes in the borough so far this year, according to Olshan Realty’s weekly contract report, which tracks homes asking $4 million or more in Manhattan. The year-to-date total surpasses the report’s annual record of $11.3 billion, set in 2014. “It’s fantastic. I think

A note to the doormen of Central Park West: keep an eye out for The One Who Knocks. Last month, Bryan Cranston, star of Breaking Bad and Malcolm in the Middle, dropped $5.6 million for a two-bedroom co-op just a pizza’s throw from the park, public records show. The two-bed, two-bath apartment sits in Harperley Hall, the 94-unit building at 41 Central Park West that once housed Madonna and Sean Penn. The 12-story structure was

Over the past few years, institutional firms have spent billions acquiring and developing single-family rental homes. It’s no big secret why: Just this past summer, single-family rents nationwide were spiking at rates not seen in 16 years. On this week’s episode of Deconstruct, reporter and lead podcaster Isabella Farr speaks to Ed Coulson, a professor at UC Irvine’s Center for Real Estate, and Josh Migdal, a real estate attorney in Miami, to discuss the allure

About 200 million shares of Compass could hit the market on Tuesday when restrictions from the brokerage’s initial public offering lift. The end of the 180-day lockup period, which prevented Compass’ largest shareholders, directors and officers from selling their holdings, means the companies’ float — shares that can be traded — will more than double. What happens when all of those shares become tradable tomorrow will depend on the patience of investors and their views

As it turns out, Martha Stewart cooked up quite a deal for her longtime oceanfront hideaway on East Hampton’s Lily Pond Lane. Stewart sold the property in mid-August to media executive Kenneth Lerer, co-founder of The Huffington Post and former longtime chairman of Buzzfeed, and his wife, interior designer Katherine Sailer. At the time the terms of the sale were not revealed. The property was reportedly asking $8.4 million, but it turns out Lerer and

A South Florida real estate agent was fired by his broker after being named in a massive leak of hacked data from Epik, a domain registrar that hosts websites with far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content. Pompano Beach agent Joshua Alayon allegedly tried to register domains that include racisminc.com, holocaust-truth.com, theholocaustisfake.com, whitechristianrepublican.com and whitesencyclopedia.com, Inman and the Washington Post reported. Alayon denied owning theracisminc.com site, which posts racist memes, but didn’t answer a question about

Luxury contracts in Brooklyn jumped last week, after weeks of not reaching the 20-contract mark. Twenty-two contracts asking $2 million or more were signed in the borough from Sept. 20-26, according to Compass’s weekly report. This is up from the previous week, which counted 15 contracts signed. Fifteen of last week’s contracts were for condominiums, five were for townhouses and two were for co-ops. The median asking price of those homes was $2.95 million. The

Middle-market investment sales traded lightly last week, with just two deals closing in Manhattan for a total of $45 million. The prior week’s five sales fetched $95 million altogether. 1. The Lightstone Group bought a 65-unit residential building at 700 West End Avenue on the Upper West Side for $28.5 million. The 15-story building spans 56,000 square feet. Salamon Realty LLC was the seller. 2. Goldman Properties unloaded three mixed-use buildings spanning 22,800 square feet

Some institutional investors are moving away from the Starrett City housing complex with a big payday after selling a stake in the development. The anonymous group of investors are selling a stake of almost 71 percent in the East New York development, a 5,881-unit complex otherwise known as Spring Creek Towers. The deal gives the complex a valuation of greater than $1.8 billion, according to city property records reported by PincusCo. The previous sale was

Mack-Cali Realty is selling another office property, agreeing to unload a waterfront Jersey City complex for $380 million. The 1.2 million-square-foot building at 101 Hudson Street counts AIG among its biggest tenants, after the firm leased 230,000 square feet last year. Real Estate Weekly first reported the news of the pending sale. Mack-Cali bought the building in 2014 for $329 million. Cushman and Wakefield negotiated the $380 million sale. Mack-Cali recently took out a $400

The Blackstone Group can head to the slots after netting a record profit for the sale of a single asset: The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Blackstone has agreed to sell the Las Vegas Strip hotel and casino for more than $5.6 billion, more than three times the $1.8 billion it paid for the property seven years ago. The company stands to make almost $4.1 billion in profit from the sale while making back close to

Oxford Properties Group has lightened its load on a massive industrial portfolio purchase, securing $1.43 billion in commercial mortgage-backed securities financing. The loan is designated for the Canadian-based company’s $2.2 billion purchase of an industrial portfolio from KKR. It comes in the form of a five-year floating-rate loan that is being securitized in a single-asset, single-borrower transaction. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank are providing the debt, according to the Commercial Observer. Oxford

Flexible Business Systems has a perfect plan to break the ice for employees: an ice rink behind the office. The Hauppauge-based information technology company had a request made on its behalf by an architect at a Smithtown Board of Zoning Appeals hearing last week, according to Newsday. The request was for a height variance that would allow for the construction of a 13,500-square-foot steel frame structure behind its office, complete with an ice rink. Flexible

New home sales ticked up for the second-straight month in August. Nationwide sales of new single-family houses rose a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about 740,000 in August, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest report. While that’s a 1.5 percent increase from July’s 729,000 units, it still represents a 24.3 percent decline from last August’s estimate of 977,000 homes, when the housing market was in a period of unprecedented activity. The median sales price