Miki Naftali took one step closer to realizing his ambitious plans on Fifth Avenue The developer landed a $675 million loan from JPMorgan to close his purchase of the 33-story 800 Fifth Avenue rental building from Eliot Spitzer and the Winter Organization, sources told The Real Deal. Naftali agreed to buy the 208-unit building last March for more than $800 million, which works out to about $2,400 per square foot. He plans to tear down the existing building and replace it with a new tower, according to a source familiar with the project. Naftali’s new development consultants at Compass had […]

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Worldwide Plaza’s market value has cratered, wiping out the equity of its owners and threatening another body blow to Midtown’s trophy office market. The 1.8 million-square-foot tower at 825 Eighth Avenue was appraised at $345 million in April, an 80 percent drop from its $1.7 billion valuation in 2017, according to CMBS loan documents obtained by Bisnow.  SL Green and RXR acquired a roughly 49 percent stake in 2015, with the now-liquidating New York REIT holding the majority. The property is backed by $940 million in CMBS debt originated by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, plus $260 million in mezzanine […]

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Development is risky and complicated. It involves lots of decisions, and bad ones can be catastrophic. For megaprojects, everything is multiplied. They are enormously challenging even for the smartest and most experienced developers. The worst way to execute a megaproject would be to hand decision-making authority to more than two dozen people, each representing different constituencies with divergent and sometimes conflicting goals — and little or no real estate experience. To make it even harder, you would have politicians lead this 28-member group and require a two-thirds majority vote to approve a master plan. You would include three levels of […]

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A colony of bats recently took up residence at the storied Jackson Lake Lodge, where central bankers and economic policymakers will convene next week for an exclusive gathering.

Normalized economic ties between Russia and the West may be a long way off, but there’s global interest in what’s said about sanctions and tariffs.

Suffolk lawmakers are moving to yank public funds from landlords whose Department of Social Services-backed rentals flout building or zoning codes. The bill, co-sponsored by Legis. Nick Caracappa and James Mazzarella, would expand existing rules that already allow the county to withhold assistance if a property is “dangerous, hazardous or detrimental to life or health.” The added language would also cover any rental that fails to comply with municipal zoning or building standards, Newsday reported. Backers frame it as a quality-of-life fix in hot spots like Mastic Beach and Coram, pointing to egregious cases, such as makeshift kitchens with Charbroil […]

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🏆 Residential: Once again, a Billionaires’ Row condominium notched the top recorded residential sale in New York City. Charles B. Moss, Jr., a Broadway producer and the co-founder of entertainment firm Bow Tie Partners, picked up a sponsor unit at 50 West 66th Street in Lincoln Square, which was developed by Gary Barnett’s Extell Development Company. The price was $16.8 million, or about $3,700 per square foot. The unit measures just over 4,500 interior square feet and has five bedrooms and five bathrooms. Corcoran’s Hilary Landis and Beth Benalloul had the listing. 🏆 Commercial: The Big Apple’s top commercial deal […]

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If the game show “Family Feud” asked contestants to name “things that scare people,” they might say horror movies, spiders and the dark. But in progressive neighborhoods of New York City, “market-rate condos” would make the list. Many debates over whether to rezone for mixed-income multifamily boil down to, “Well, if we do nothing, they’ll build market-rate condos” — “luxury units” that “nobody can afford” and would “price out” longtime residents. A true boogeyman. Usually a deal is reached for a mix of market-rate and affordable rentals, and people move on with their lives. But sometimes, negotiations fail and a […]

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Strong corporate earnings, mostly stable tariff rates and the expectation of interest rate cuts have eased worries of a market reckoning.

A co-op once owned by the late socialite Lee Radziwill hit the market asking just under $17 million.  The duplex at 969 Fifth Avenue last traded more than two decades ago, when Suzanne von Liebig, the wife of the late inventor and philanthropist William von Liebig, purchased it for $7.6 million, according to the listing broker, Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group. Von Liebig renovated the apartment, which spans the fifth and sixth floors of the building between East 77th and East 78th streets, before moving in in early 2004. Modlin said she has “maintained it at a high level,” […]

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