The Real Deal - New York Real Estate News

The city is taking on lenders of “zombie homes” — decrepit, vacant, distressed houses with unpaid mortgages, which have forced the city to conduct emergency repairs and maintenance. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is seeking more than $1 million from CitiMortgage, Wells Fargo and other home lenders who have allegedly failed to maintain houses on the brink of foreclosure, the department announced. The cases target five Brooklyn properties and their lenders including […]

Google could open its first long-term store in New York City. Really. The company declined to use an option to terminate its retail lease at 131 Greene Street, Crain’s reported, which indicates that it plans to use it. Google leased the 5,442-square-foot space in 2014 but kept it vacant and initially listed it for sublease. Now, after declining its termination option, the company is committed to paying $2 million in rent per year until 2024. […]

Cafe Loup, the famous literary fixture in the West Village, has been seized by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. It’s unclear whether the closure is permanent, Eater reported. According the state’s records, Cafe Loup has four warrants for unpaid taxes dating back to September 2017 — which total $241,656. The bistro opened in 1977 on West 13th Street near University Place and later moved down the street to the retail space […]

Stamford apartment building fetches $78M in city’s largest multifamily sale this year San Francisco-based Friedkin Realty Group purchased an apartment building in Stamford from Norwalk-based Fuller Development LLC and Spinnaker Real Estate Partners for $78 million — the largest multifamily sale in the city so far this year, The Hour reported. CBRE brokered the deal for Element One, the 183-unit building which opened on Morgan Street around two years ago, according to the outlet. “We […]

Spotify is yet again expanding its footprint in Lower Manhattan, and is now the second largest tenant at 4 World Trade Center. Spotify will add just under 86,000 square feet to its current 478,000 square feet at 4 World Trade Center, which houses the music streaming company’s U.S. headquarters, according to Crain’s. It will be subletting the extra space from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is also headquartered at the […]

Is paying the electricity bill worth taking out a second mortgage? Around one in six Americans thinks so. About 24 million U.S. homeowners think it’s acceptable to tap into home equity to pay everyday household bills, according to a new report by Bankrate.com. The survey found that young, less educated, and lower earning homeowners were more apt to say so. The survey found that nearly one in three homeowners who earn less than $30,000 annually […]

Hudson Companies has pre-filed plans for a 152-unit mixed-use building in Cypress Hills. The building at 265 Logan Street will stand 12 stories tall and span about 280,000 square feet, split between roughly 271,000 square feet of residential space and 9,000 square feet of commercial space, according to the Department of Buildings. Hudson Companies declined to comment on the project. Phipps Houses is also working on a project in Cypress Hills—a section of East New […]

With manufacturing on the decline, developers are increasingly turning old industrial buildings into distribution centers. According to a report by Newmark Knight Frank, e-commerce is driving demand for industrial properties that can be repositioned into or demolished to make way for distribution centers. Many of these warehouses are located in northern and central New Jersey, where sites offer quick access to highways, rails and ports. In Piscataway, the Rockefeller Group is turning a 228-acre site […]

Fresh off its impressive haul at the Emmys, Netflix is planning to open a new office in the Flatiron District. The streaming-video and distribution company, which has a market cap of nearly $160 billion, is in late-stage talks to lease space at Normandy Real Estate Partners’ 888 Broadway, sources told The Real Deal. Netflix is in discussions to occupy 38,000 square feet. Normandy is converting the upper floors of the former ABC Carpet & Home […]

The Upper East Side home of late celebrity chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain is on the market asking $3.7 million. Bourdain, who died of an apparent suicide in June while filming a segment of his show in France, bought the Carnegie Hill apartment at 40 East 94th Street with his wife, Ottavia Busia, in 2014 for $3.35 million. The couple became estranged, though, and Bourdain left the bulk of his $1.2 million estate to […]

Housing investment startup EasyKnock raised $3.5 million in venture capital, the company announced Wednesday. Montage Ventures, Crestar Partners and Blumberg Capital participated in the Seed round. The Manhattan-based company, founded in 2016 by Jarred Kessler and Benjamin Black, buys homes and allows the sellers to remain as renters for a fixed lease term.  At the end of the term, the renter can either buy back the home for a previously agreed price or move out. […]

A decade later, New York City housing prices have surpassed the peak levels from before the financial crisis. Sales prices for houses and apartments are 2 percent above the peak levels of November 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing StreetEasy data. Prices are 28.5 percent higher than when the market bottomed in November 2011. People who bought and sold a house or apartment after September 2008 scored gains of 33 percent, or 7.5 percent […]

Aby Rosen’s RFR Realty refinanced two Midtown buildings with a $200 million loan package. The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System will provide a $25 million gap mortgage on top of an existing $175 million in debt, backed by both 350 Madison Avenue and 10 East 45th Street, records filed with the city Wednesday show. RFR bought 350 Madison Avenue, a 25-story office property, for $262 million in 2013. The deal also included the adjacent […]

The Related Companies paid $96 million for the Far West Side site that will be part of the 1.4 million-square-foot, mixed-use project the company is developing with Eliot Spitzer. The Hudson Yards developer closed less than two weeks ago on the site at 517 West 35th Street, property records filed with the city Wednesday show. Related is financing the purchase with a $65 million loan from Mack Real Estate Credit Strategies. The $96 million purchase […]

The latest project to replace a former Jehovah’s Witnesses site in Brooklyn will stand 26 stories tall with 74 units at 30 Front Street, according to records filed Wednesday. Fortis Property Group filed plans with the Department of Buildings that call for about 250,000 square feet of development overall, split between 178,000 square feet of residential space and 72,000 square feet of community space. The property was the last development site that the religious group […]

Chinese conglomerate HNA Group, the largest shareholder in Deutsche Bank, is reportedly selling its stake in the German bank. The move comes as chairman Chen Fang increases his control over the company with the appointment of relatives to key company positions. The Chinese firm, which spent $40 billion on overseas acquisitions and has carried as much as $90 billion in debt, has been told by the Chinese government to offload all assets except its core airline […]

When the city wanted to tear down a Brooklyn condominium building plagued by scandal, Council member Letitia James, who represented a neighboring district, was the last line of defense. Developer Mendel Brach, who was accused of illegally developing the lot at 201 Spencer Street, allegedly exploited a faculty-housing exemption to build larger condo units. The nine-story property was supposed to house members of the local Yeshiva, but Brach sold the site’s 72 units on the […]

Riverside Church is in contract to buy a Gothic stone dormitory from its neighbor Union Theological Seminary for $45 million. Another bidder, Craig Nassi of BCN Development, had been in contract to purchase the building at 97 Claremont Avenue, and had even received financing to redevelop the site, according to the New York Post. But the church stepped in and was able to lean on a restriction imposed by John D. Rockefeller that determined the […]

A U.S. Treasury Department program that spotlights anonymous real estate purchases in a number of gateway cities could become a nationwide law if a Russian sanctions bill is passed. The little-known provision in the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2018, a bipartisan bill introduced to the Senate last month, would force title insurance companies to report the identities of people using limited liability companies behind high-priced real estate transactions across the country. […]

New York City must cut down on capital projects and employee benefits to emerge from its $252 billion debt hole, according to a new controversial report. Citizen’s Budget Commission, a fiscally conservative think tank, found that the city has been unable to capitalize on a boom in tax revenue and a strong economy to emerge from its debt, leaving it exposed in the event of a future downturn in the economy, according to Crain’s. The […]

Residential sales have slowed, the cost of running a brokerage has climbed, and tech is becoming more of a threat by the minute. While there has been plenty of coverage of all of those issues, most of the headlines have focused on how New York City’s bigger players —  the Douglas Ellimans and Corcoran Groups of the world — are handling it all. The small and midsized firms, which grind out deals in the less […]

August was a low-key month for the Manhattan real estate debt market, with the top ten deals totaling just $1.6 billion, less than half of last month’s total ($3.26 billion), and even less than the top-10 outer borough loans, a rare occurrence. Most of the larger loans that did take place last month were refinancings of existing mortgages. See the full list below: 1. 101 Park Ave – $365 million The largest debt deal in […]