12/02/08

October 2008
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Broadway Partners races to unload its trophy towers

With hundreds of millions of dollars in short-term debt coming due in January, Lawlor's private equity firm has emerged as the latest poster child for overleveraged post-boom distress. Now that Harry Macklowe's goose has been cooked..
By Adam Piore

Rent-to-own catching on

Brooklyn developers are trying to woo would-be buyers who may be indecisive about the market's health with deals that allow them to rent a unit in a condo while putting their monthly rent checks toward a down payment. Other developers are also switching to their back-up plan, changing buildings from sales to rentals, but not without costs and complications.
By Gabby Warshawer

Which neighborhoods will take biggest knock?

Daniel Baum, chief executive officer of the Real Estate Group New York, a brokerage, said the Financial District, which has a number of new condo and high-end rental projects, could be among the first neighborhoods to see price drops.
By Alex Ulam

Seeing less green in Fort Greene

Two years ago, Time Out New York named a stretch of South Portland Avenue in Fort Greene the "best block" in New York. Now, while the brownstone market is basically holding its own amidst a sluggish sales climate, developers of a handful of new Fort Greene condos are seeing units languish on the market.
By Gabby Warshawer

Freshening up the inventory

To bring new attention to properties that have lingered for weeks or months without any movement, an increasing number of brokers have pulled apartments off the market, with the intention of giving them a short hiatus and then re-listing them.
By Lisa Abramowicz

Hunting for Truffles

The sign on the side of the nearly finished building on West and Desbrosses streets has drawn attention for prominently displaying the curious quote from playwright Edward Albee: "You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are."
By Jen Benepe

Bull

Breaking the bull

When the nation's finance sector ended as the world knew it last month, the city's real estate community was left slack-jawed, wondering what it would mean for the commercial and residential markets. With behemoth investment banks falling like dominoes, New York's brokers and developers started getting used to the fact that the oncoming pain would be far deeper than previously expected. This month, The Real Deal breaks down the Wall Street meltdown by sector in a series of stories that look at the numbers that matter to real estate insiders.
By Alison Gregor
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Heading uptown for low rents

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Washington Heights -- an old-fashioned, no-frills neighborhood dominated by small buildings and mom-and-pop stores -- is one of the last city neighborhoods for rental bargains, according to brokers. Suffering a double whammy from the impact of the residential market slowdown and a lingering (some say outdated) reputation for crime, the neighborhood located at the northern tip of Manhattan still attracts priced-out refugees from Greenwich Village, Chelsea and the Upper West Side.
By Abby Luby

The Closing: Frederick Peters

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President of Warburg Realty Partnership. After starting in the business as a residential agent in 1980, he worked his way up to manager at Albert B. Ashforth. In 1991, he bought a majority stake in the firm's New York residential arm and renamed it Ashforth Warburg Associates. Twelve years later, he renamed the firm again, this time to Warburg Realty Partnership. Today Warburg has 150 brokers in five Manhattan offices, including one in Harlem, where it was the first large Manhattan firm to open an office.
By Lauren Elkies

Limelight shines on Candela again

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Rosario Candela came to America at the age of 19, knowing just a few words of English. But within a decade, the Italian immigrant was designing some of the most luxurious buildings Park Avenue had ever seen. His quick rise from immigrant to famed architect left a permanent imprint on the city's skyline -- so much so that today, two of his buildings are again in the limelight.
By Jovana Rizzo

Worry chills local residential market

Financial news headlines about Wall Street's meltdown are ratcheting up the fear factor for buyers and sellers, who are becoming even more cautious about plunging into the real estate market. Industry experts anticipate price drops across the board. But certain residential neighborhoods will probably be hit harder than others by the chaos on Wall Street.
By Lauren Elkies, Jovana Rizzo and Alex Ulam

No real spark from Macklowe resales

Industry watchers had hoped the sales of Macklowe's former assets -- which were seized in February by Deutsche Bank after the highly leveraged real estate mogul defaulted on nearly $7 billion in loans -- would revive what had been a dormant commercial real estate market here.
By David Jones

Koolhaas defies gravity


Not all the trend-shattering residential projects in New York are in West Chelsea. The Madison Square Park/Flatiron area, with its traditional buildings, is an unlikely spot for the iconoclastic Dutch designer and architectural philosopher Rem Koolhaas to make his New York City residential debut, but he has done so with a dramatically cantilevered, steel-and-glass condominium high-rise under construction at 23 East 22nd Street.

By Steve Cutler

Wall Street woes expected to increase available space

Layoffs from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America and the government takeover of American International Group should create another 3 to 4 million square feet in availability, said Steven Coutts, senior vice president of national research services at commercial brokerage Studley.
By Adam Pincus

Fro-yo face-off

The fro-yo trend began picking up steam when Pinkberry opened its first Manhattan store in late 2006; the company, which was started in Los Angeles in February 2005, was already hugely popular in its hometown. Pinkberry expanded quickly in New York — within a year, the chain had eight locations in the city.
By Gabby Warshawer

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