Dana Rubinstein

BJ's Wholesale Club is poised to join Ikea as the newest big-box store in Red Hook, according to the Brooklyn Paper, confirming predictions that the quaint neighborhood is fast becoming popular with unbecoming mega-retailers.

Here's the paper's scoop:

"BJ’s Wholesale Club, the members-only retail chain, is close to finalizing a deal to open a big box store on the Red Hook waterfront, The Brooklyn Paper has learned.

The retailer that sells everything from pet food to flat screen televisions is on the verge of announcing plans to move into the former site of the Revere Sugar factory, next door to the recently opened Ikea on Beard Street.

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New York real estate investors are increasingly sending their money overseas, and their favorite targets are, in descending order, Germany, Australia and Japan, according to a report to be released this week.

“It’s increasing big time,” said Dan Fasulo, managing director of research for Real Capital Analytics, which produced the report.

Mr. Fasulo said the precise amounts of money invested by specific New York City investors wouldn’t be included in the report (nor would the amount breakdown by country), since the information is proprietary. But, he said, New York investors have spent more than $50 billion on foreign commercial real estate in the past two years.  read more »

Here’s how you know the commercial-mortgage-backed securities market is in deep slumber: Goldman Sachs, king of the Wall Street shops, hasn’t originated a CMBS loan in nine months, according to two sources close to the bank.

It’s no secret that banks like Wachovia and Lehman and UBS are no longer issuing securities backed by mortgages with the ease of missionaries distributing Gideon Bibles. Investors have had to start hitting up balance-sheet lenders, like regional banks, and cobbling together smaller loans. But Goldman? Goldman is one of the few investment banks that actually has a CMBS crew in place on Wall Street.  read more »

The Manhattan office space market has increasingly come to resemble the 1999 film Office Space, with rumors of impending layoffs, nervous employees, and frustrated brokers taking copy machines to empty fields and viciously assaulting them with baseball bats.

O.K., that last part isn’t true. But still, this summer has been a bummer! In July, Manhattan’s overall office vacancy rate hit 7.3 percent, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Same time last year, it was 5.8 percent. Asking rents have continued to creep up, but the numbers have been rendered essentially meaningless by a bonanza of concessions from landlords. (You take this space, I’ll give you one year’s free rent and dinner for two at the Four Seasons!)

At the end of July, Colliers ABR’s Robert Sammons—unafraid to look the fearsome ogre in the eye—predicted the vacancy rate would rise to 10.  read more »

By year’s end, some of commercial real estate’s freshest young brokers will give up on the somnolent field and start searching for a new line of work, according to the industry’s older hands.

“This is a cliché, but this is the time when the men are separated from the boys,” said Cory Zelnik, of Zelnik and Company.

It’s apparently an apt cliché: “This market, I hate to say it, separates the men from the boys, the strong from the weak,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail leasing and sales division at Prudential Douglas Elliman. The “boys” in this case are the newcomers.  read more »

Joe Bruno is marketing space in Eliot Spitzer's Crown Building.

No, silly, not that Joe Bruno!

Still, the irony is rich. A real estate broker who just happens to have the same name as the former governor's arch-nemesis, is the sublease agent for space on the eighth floor of the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue -- home to the offices of real estate patriarch Bernie Spitzer and his errant son Eliot, and, conveniently, of Playboy Enterprises.

Joe Bruno, an associate at NAI Global, is marketing 9,935 square feet of the historic building for the remaining three years of a lease. The ad boasts, among other things, "northern exposure over 57th Street," "private bathrooms," and "prestigious Fifth Avenue location."

The asking rent isn't listed, but asking rents for a direct lease on the seventh floor are $89 a square foot, according to CoStar.

The Brooklyn Children's Museum -- the hands-on instititution popular with tykes from Tremont to Poughkeepsie -- is slated to reopen as the first LEED-certified museum in New York City on Sept. 20, according to a spokeswoman for the project and Interior Design.

The Rafael-Vinoly-designed addition to the Crown Heights insititution will, according to the design mag, double the size of the museum to more than 100,000 square feet. The addition, covered in 8.1 million (!!) very, very yellow ceramic tiles, will presumably allow for more exhibition space (and maybe even bigger digs for Fantasia, the 17-foot-long Burmese Python?).

To achieve LEED-silver certification, the addition has "rapidly renewable and recycled materials" like "bamboo and recycled rubber flooring.  read more »

First came the overhaul of the old Jewish Hospital into quasi-luxury rentals. Then came Saje. Chavella's. Bristen's. Two clothing boutiques. The beer garden. Abigail. The gentrification of Crown Heights -- in all of its prickly glory -- continues apace with the impending arrival of Lily & Fig Fine Cakes and Confections on Franklin Avenue and Park Place.

The high-end sweeterie sells its Florette cake (above) -- which is described on the store's Web site as "[f]our layers of chocolate sponge with a raspberry ganache filling, coated with your choice of Belgian dark or white chocolate icing and topped with an exquisite corsage of sugar-paste flowers" -- for $75.  read more »

The apparently inexorable rise of a skyscraper city on the edge of Fort Greene continues apace, with developer Bruce Ratner's announcement on Wednesday that Forest City Ratner had secured financing for its first residential tower in Brooklyn, the Costas Kondylis-designed, 34-story 80 DeKalb Avenue.

The glass building will join the Forte Condo (at Ashland Place and Fulton Street), and the soon-to-be-built Danspace project across the street to form a small mini-city on the edge of Fort Greene, bordering Downtown Brooklyn -- but a taste of the 16-skyscraper-and-arena Atlantic Yards complex to come.

The tower will house 292 market-rate rentals and 73 affordable rentals, "making it the first 80/20 development in Brooklyn financed with bonds issued by the New York State Housing Finance Agency," according to the release.  read more »

Enough already!

That's the clarion call of Amity Shlaes, economic historian with the Council on Foreign Relations and Brooklyn Heights resident, who argues, with the help of Nobel laureate and economist Edmund Phelps, that Americans need to stop obsessing about the "housing crisis" and focus on things more integral to our economic health -- like, oh, say, productivity?

"It used to be said that the business of America was business,'' Mr. Phelps told Ms. Shlaes, in her column for Bloomberg News. "Now the business of America is homeownership.''

Ms. Shlaes elaborates:

Like an apartment building, the Phelps argument works on multiple levels.

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HSBC employees should soon, from their aerie atop 7 World Trade Center, be able to peer down at the morass of construction at the city-and-state controlled ground zero below.

The massive bank is poised to become landlord Larry Silverstein’s newest tenant at 7 World Trade. Now that HSBC has a lease pending on the 52-story tower’s top seven floors—comprising 280,000 square feet of the tower’s 1.7 million—7 World Trade is nearly full.

A knowledgeable source told us that a lease is indeed “out,” as commercial real estate’s insufferable jargon would have it, meaning that a lease exists, HSBC has a copy and its execs are eyeing the dotted line.  read more »

Entertainment law powerhouse Pryor Cashman, whose clients include Penthouse founder Bob Guccione and numerous American Idol contestants, is in negotiations for 100,000 square feet at 605 Third Avenue, the 44-story glass box of a building owned by Fisher Brothers.

“We are in negotiations for space at 605 Third Avenue and for other spaces as well,” confirmed Ronald Shechtman, Pryor Cashman’s managing partner, in a statement, adding that the firm has reached no agreements with anyone.

Mr. Shechtman later elaborated that the firm right now occupies about 100,000 square feet of contiguous space in three buildings, which means three leases—all of which expire at the end of next year—and three landlords.  read more »

A developer’s at least three-year-old plan for a 61-story Shangri-La hotel and condo project in midtown east is expected to sail through two City Council committees on Aug. 13, paving the way for the entire Council to approve the project the following day and for development to finally begin sometime thereafter.

The Hines Development project calls for a Norman Foster-designed glass tower at 610 Lexington Avenue, at the corner of 53rd Street, with 107 residential condos and 50 condo-hotel units, according to the developer’s Web site. (Recent reports indicate the Shangri-La will instead have 206 hotel rooms and just 17 condos; the developer could not be reached for comment.  read more »

Labor Day has a psychic symbolism for commercial real estate brokers this year that has little to do with the plight of the American worker.

Rather, some are predicting that, once New York City’s deal makers have returned from their Labor Day Hamptons sojourns all bronzed and plump, having spent countless hours running their fingers through the sand while contemplating the fierce expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, office asking rents will start dropping.

“After Labor Day, a lot of people who’ve been on the offensive, they have gotten some feedback and will start to realize that, hey, this economy isn’t as strong as we thought,” said Robert Stella, executive vice president and principal at tenants’ rep CresaPartners, who said he’d likely go to his place up in Connecticut this month.  read more »

HSBC Bank is poised to become Larry Silverstein's newest tenant at 7 World Trade Center, with a lease pending on the last big block of space in the 52-story, 741-foot, two-year-old skyscraper on the edge of Ground Zero.

The banking giant has a lease out on 280,000 square feet of space comprising the top seven floors of the building, according to a knowledgeable source. While the lease has yet to be signed, insiders believe it's nearly a done deal. (We guess that means no more penthouse parties for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.)

Read more about the pending deal in Wednesday's print Observer.

Governor Paterson has signed a bill that will forbid anyone convicted of a sexual crime -- including sexual misdemeanors -- from getting a New York State real estate broker license, according to The Business Review.

The New York State Association of Realtors, which lobbied for the legislation, applauded its signing:

“New Yorkers will be safer as a result of this new law,” said NYSAR President Linda J. Page, in a press release. “By signing this vital piece of legislation into law, Governor Paterson has ensured that convicted sex offenders will no longer have access to the real estate transaction process as a means to commit heinous crimes. We thank Governor Paterson and our legislative sponsors, Senator Charles Fuschillo and Assemblyman Jonathan Bing for taking the lead on this issue.”

Now, if someone would protect us from what is likely a much widerspread problem: predatory mortgage brokers.

Poor Greyhound -- it may have flaws, but this is just plain bad luck.

The bus company has pulled TV and print ads boasting, "There's a reason you've never heard of 'bus rage,'" after one bus passenger saw fit to behead and then eat scraps of another passenger, according to the AP (which saw fit to slug its article, "Greyhound scraps ads after Canada bus beheading"):

"Greyhound knows how important it is to get these removed and we are doing everything possible," Abby Wambaugh, a Greyhound spokeswoman, told the AP. "This is something that we immediately asked to be done last week, realizing that these could be offensive.

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The riveting tale of one-time real estate baron Robert Durst – estranged older brother of developer Douglas Durst – has been made into a feature film starring Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling. Called All Good Things, the film will debut in 2009.

Its release will mark yet another painful episode for the otherwise upstanding Durst family, which is known in New York City for its impressive property holdings (including the new One Bryant Park and the Conde Nast headquarters at 4 Times Square), its environmentally sustainable building practices, and its upstate organic farm.  read more »

A 91-unit apartment building at the corner of West End Avenue and 101st Street has traded for $83 million, an uplifting note in an otherwise dreary market.

An entity called Sterling American Property Fund IV bought the building, 845 West End Avenue, from Nostra Realty Corp on July 24, according to a deed that entered city records yesterday.

The purchaser had to put down $23 million for the purchase (27.8 percent) and got $60 million in financing from Valley National Bank, according to CoStar.

The 13,398-square-foot building was built in 1930. Two-bedroom apartments in the building rent for between $6,250 and $8,500 a month, according to streeteasy.com.

Correction: The building's square footage is 200,981.

"The worm has finally turned, and quickly," reads tenant rep CresaPartners's second quarter market report, released yesterday evening.

"The statistics show that the market was relatively flat in the second quarter of 2008, despite some increases in available space and reduced leasing activity, but regular announcements of layoffs on Wall Street are sapping the confidence out of the market."

Per usual, the stats were mixed -- with rent dipping in Midtown, increasing in Midtown South, and a mixed bag Downtown. See below:

From the first quarter to the second, Class A rents in Midtown dipped from $84.46 a square foot to $84.11, while Class B rents dipped from $53.97 to $53.17.

In Midtown South, Class A and B combined rose from $52.94 to $54.14.

And Downtown, Class A rents rose more than $5 a square foot from $47.41 to $52.98, while Class B rents dipped more than $6 from $54.26 to $47.33.

To cover commercial real estate in the year 2008 is to experience the distinct sensation that you’ve stumbled into the 1950s, or onto Staten Island. It’s a world in which men joke about “broads” at the male-mostly conference table, where spotting a woman at a Real Estate Board luncheon is a cinch—she’s the sole red-breasted bird in the forest of white-crested pinstripes and charcoals.

Here, in this bizarro throwback of an industry, members can tick off on their fingers the influential women among them. Mary Ann Tighe, the fiercely powerful CEO for the tristate region at CB Richard Ellis, is always the first name, followed by the firm’s mighty vice chairman for investment properties, Darcy Stacom.  read more »

In the worsening economic downturn, some real estate investment trusts and brokerages are showing signs of weakness.

On Jan. 2, stocks of Forest City Ratner parent Forest City Enterprises traded at $43.62 a share. On Aug. 4, they traded for nearly half the price, at $25.60. Leading office landlord SL Green, which started the year at $92.56 a share, was trading at $79.67 by Aug. 4. Meanwhile, CB Richard Ellis saw its stock fall from $21.38 on Jan. 2 to $13.45 on Aug. 4.

During its second-quarter earnings call on June 30, CBRE’s president and CEO, Brett White, said that “volume decline in both the capital markets and leasing businesses are approaching the worst decline seen since the early 1990s, and 2001 through 2003.  read more »

The investment side of the commercial real estate industry is rife with tales about buildings sitting pretty, and pretty, and pretty, while brokers and landlords and buyers finagle, and time passes.

There’s the Forbes Building, the American Stock Exchange Building, the four remaining Equity Office Portfolio towers on the market since early this year.

Aside from the oft-repeated truisms that the market is in the dumps, financing is scarce and buyers and sellers are engaged in a pricing stalemate in which both refuse to budge, there might well be another factor.

Back in July 2007, when a buyer had a contract out on a building, that meant there were two players involved—the buyer and the seller.  read more »

Who would’ve thunk that statements Barack Obama made in April would have repercussions in the New York investment sales market in August?

Building owners, fearful that a Democratic administration will raise capital gains taxes (or that a Republican one will do the same, given the proven flexibility of John McCain on myriad issues), are putting their buildings on the market so that they can sell them before Jan. 1. That’s the date at which any midyear ’09 tax hike would likely apply retroactively.

Here’s what unsettled them. On April 16, during the Democratic debate in Philly, ABC moderator Charles Gibson sternly queried Senator Obama about his former promise not to raise capital gains taxes higher than 28 percent—the top rate under Bill Clinton.  read more »

There’s a lovely red brick building on the edge of Tribeca that, like a child of divorcing parents, hangs in the balance—belonging neither here, nor there, and utterly empty inside.

Plaza owner El-Ad Properties bought 250 West Street, a 98-year-old building 11 stories tall, from Citigroup in 2006 for $142 million. Bank workers have since emptied the building, bidding farewell to Robert De Niro’s largely residential fiefdom. And, in November, El-Ad went into contract to flip 250 West to an entity called Coalco for $201 million (a tidy 41 percent markup).

Here’s the funny thing. Now it’s August, more than eight months later, and Coalco has yet to close on the empty building.  read more »

Whole Foods has signed as the anchor tenant for a new development at 57th Street and Second Avenue, making it the sixth outlet for the Austin-based food retailer in foodie-laden New York City.

The World-Wide Group announced this evening that Whole Foods would, starting in 2012, occupy 47,000 square feet in its mixed-use development.

“We are pleased to sign such a strong anchor tenant for this pioneering mixed-use project,” said David Lowenfeld, executive vice president of the World-Wide Group, in a statement. “Whole Foods has a proven track record of success in New York City as well as an established reputation for giving back to the community.  read more »

Location: Last year, a Legal Media Group study named you the best-connected and most powerful real estate lawyer in the world. That’s sort of extraordinary.

Mr. Mechanic: I did get a kick out of that, I have to admit. That was fun. I went to a meeting with a tenant I was representing with a pretty good sense of humor, and I walked in and he said, ‘Aha! We now have the best real estate lawyer in the galaxy!’ So you have to enjoy all that. But I think I’m pretty good at what I do, and certainly I have lots of relationships that I’ve developed in almost 30 years in the business.  read more »

Pessismism is back!

Raymond Torto, global chief economist for CB Richard Ellis, gives an unvarnished perspective of the global real estate market in his August "Global Viewpoint."

Some choice tidbits:

"The unwinding of the U.S. housing and mortgage market euphoria has produced tremors that, at mid-year 2008, have reached seismic proportions." (Editor's note: Yikes!)

"...It is our view that U.S. policy makers have aggressively and successfully addressed the problems of systemic risk in the U.S. economy. However, we expect more bad news during the next six to 9 months from the economy as job cuts continue, and from real estate markets as occupancy, rents and prices fall.  read more »

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For perhaps the first time, commercial brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield predicted unequivocably that Manhattan office rents would drop, in its just released second quarter investment sales report.

Among the report's sobering conclusions:

■ Year-over-year sales activity through 2Q08 down 59 percent at $13.8 billion

■ Foreign investors have replaced previous high leverage buyers

■ Manhattan vacancy increased 1 percent to 7.1 percent in the last quarter, yet rising rents reached a record high of $71.59 a square foot, up 21 percent from a year ago

■ As financial sector layoffs materialize, rents will decrease

■ Development pipeline limited due to a lack of construction financing

For the full report, see attached.

Spin magazine -- like Omnicom and American Lawyer magazine before it -- is moving downtown.

The music magazine has just signed a lease for 14,300 square feet at 408 Broadway, near the corner of Lispenard Street. The magazine is trading up from the 12,000 square feet it now occupies at 205 Lexington Avenue, between 32nd and 33rd streets.

“Spin was looking for space to grow, and was attracted to the building’s old-school, loft atmosphere, which includes high ceilings and narrow, cast-iron columns,” said CBRE broker Derrick Ades in a statement.

Mr. Ades worked with brokers Matthew Bergey and Brian Feil on the deal. Cushman & Wakefield's Phil Amarante represented the mag.  read more »

Citing sanitary concerns, the Metrotech BID has barred dogs from frolicking on the Metrotech Commons, depriving Downtown Brooklyn pooches access to one of their favorite pieces of real estate, reports The Brooklyn Paper.

“[We are] certainly willing to have people sit there on a blanket — that’s not prohibited — but it conflicts with the dog thing because if the dog is doing his number on the lawn, it could be unsanitary,” Michael Weiss, executive director of the BID, told The Paper. “You can just clean up so much, and you can’t clean up wet stuff.”

According to the reporter:

As new residents move in to the predominantly commercial area, so too are residents’ dogs, and, in an area unaccustomed to the needs of a 24-7 population, there are very few places where residents can walk — and relieve — their Fidos and Fifis.  read more »

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Guess attorneys aren't the cockroaches of the corporate world after all, able to survive cataclysms while their more fallible colleagues in finance and real estate fall.

Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft will lay off 96 attorneys from its New York and London offices thanks to a shortage of real estate finance and securities work, according to a Bloomberg report:

``We're in the process of talking to lawyers here,'' Cadwalader Chairman Chris White said in an interview. He declined to comment on whether fired attorneys will receive severance pay through the end of the year, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

At least a dozen law firms have cut lawyers and staff since the U.  read more »

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CB Richard Ellis won the latest battle in its blood war with rival Cushman & Wakefield, brokering leases involving over twice as much Manhattan square footage in the first half of 2008, according to the biannual top 50 list from Crain’s.

The divide between CBRE and C&W—the Montagues and the Capulets of the real estate world (minus the romance and murder, as far as we know)—expanded, with CBRE brokering 4.9 million square feet to C&W’s 1.9 million. Last year by June 30, CBRE had brokered 4.3 million square feet to C&W’s 1.5 million.

Stated another way, this year, CBRE appeared seven times in the list of top 10 deals and 26 times in the top 50.  read more »

Enough with the vagaries! We’ve all heard about the loads of space supposedly coming on the market. Now, thanks to Colliers ABR whiz Robert Sammons, we give you the top 10 leasable spaces on the Manhattan block. My, oh my, they are large:

St. John’s Center, at 532-582 Washington Street, leads the pack with 750,000 square feet, available immediately.

Nearly as sizable is 825 Eighth Avenue, better known as Worldwide Plaza, which has 709,000 square feet of space on the block.  read more »

Our condolences to all you landlord reps out there. The Manhattan office vacancy rate may well rise to 10.7 percent by year’s end, according to a second-quarter report from Colliers ABR, and you know what that means—a tenant’s market is coming.

According to said report, released on Tuesday, “23 potential blocks 100,000 square feet or greater [are] expected to hit the market over the remainder of this year which could add just under 9 million square feet to availability (15 percent sublease) and raise the Manhattan overall vacancy rate to 10.7 percent by year-end.”

Robert Sammons, the managing director of research for the brokerage and the author of the report, elaborated for us.  read more »

The buzzards are taking their time picking apart the seven-limbed body of midtown buildings that Harry Macklowe snatched to great acclaim in 2007.

A source has confirmed that Somerset Partners, the outfit that last year bought 450 Park Avenue from Taconic Investment Partners for $509 million, is one of a number of predators circling 527 Madison Avenue, which has an asking price of $240 million; and that Transwestern, a little-known Chicago firm, is tearing off Tower 56 at 126 East 56th Street for $160 million.

But even when those buildings trade, four of the septet—Park Avenue Tower, Worldwide Plaza, 1540 Broadway and 850 Third Avenue—the choicest of meat in good economic times, will remain up for sale.  read more »

Marquee New York properties notwithstanding, foreign investors are fast losing interest in an American commercial real estate market increasingly buffeted by the credit crisis.

According to an Associated Press report published in today's International Herald Tribune:

"Middle East investment is expected to be flat or down this year compared to a banner year in 2007. More than half way through the year, Mideast investors have shelled out $2.7 billion for U.S. assets, according to Real Estate Analytics Inc., a New York-based real-estate research firm. But at that pace, this year's total sales will likely fall far below last year's $8.2 billion in deals.  read more »

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It’s getting ugly out there. So ugly, that Wharton Property Advisors has taken to quoting Shakespeare to attract office tenants. The firm’s most recent release, detailing 10 available spaces, opens with:

"Exit, pursued by a bear."

William Shakespeare, "Winter's Tale"
(Act III, scene iii, stage direction)

It’s a graceful use of a stage direction, even if the brokers are referring to a bear market, not the fate of Antigonus and Perdita.

The release in question reminds those in the industry that for every cloud – in this case, a sun-obscuring whirlwind worthy of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film – there is a silver lining.  read more »

After refining The Slatin Report over the past five years into a reliable source for real estate industry insiders, Peter Slatin has officially bid the blogosphere farewell.

In "Moving On," his final post on his Web site, www.theslatinreport.com, Mr. Slatin officially announced that he would be shuttering The Report and moving to Real Capital Analytics:

"As RCA's Editorial Director and Associate Publisher, I will be responsible for their closely watched Capital Trends publications. These include monthly editions covering Office, Retail, Apartments and Industrial in the US as well as a quarterly Hotel report. These publications, like RCA's data – and like The Slatin Report, have become industry standards that professionals turn to for clear market intelligence and analysis

I will also be focusing on an important publication that RCA introduced this year, Global Capital Trends. GCT tracks the increasingly influential movement of capital into and out of real estate across borders and continents."

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ThoroughbredTimes.com -- our favorite horse racing rag -- is reporting that the state's selection of a vendor to convert the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens into a racino should be happening soon. Real soon.

That's because New York State's Division of Lottery has finally reviewed all three proposals and deemed all three viable.

The parties vying for the chance to remake the dilapidated racetrack include SL Green in partnership with Hard Rock Entertainment; Delaware North Companies with Saratoga Harness Racing; and Capital Play, in partnership with Mohegan Sun, Extell Development and Plainfield Asset Management.

Morgan Hook, a spokesman for the governor, told ThoroughbredTimes.com that Governor Paterson, the Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver now "can begin to have discussions about which one will be best for the state.  read more »

Big news on multiple fronts thanks to a very complicated transaction just completed by CB Richard Ellis.

Arch Insurance Company, which CBRE just announced is consolidating its back-office operations in Jersey City, moving 300 employees to 107,000 square feet in Mack-Cali Realty Corp.'s Harborside Financial Center, is releasing space in midtown Manhattan and in the Financial District to an investment banking firm founded by the former head of UBS, and to Cleary Gottlieb, the white-shoe law firm.

Arch Insurance has subleased 30,000 square feet at 245 Park Avenue to Moelis & Co., former UBS Investment Bank president Kenneth Moelis' eponymous new firm that is, as CBRE broker Mark Ravesloot put it, "bursting at the seams" in its current space.  read more »

Mort Zuckerman and company provided their now typical dose of depressing market predictions this morning during Boston Properties' second quarter earnings call.

Our favorite bleak comment came from President Doug Linde, who, in speaking about the challenges facing the average American consumer, said, "We don't see any immediate catalyst for optimism."

Such artful use of business-speak!

Clearly someone's been spending too much time with Mr. Zuckerman, who has taken to using his public appearances to intone about the dire straits of the American economy (not that his statements are without merit. But sometimes, it's just so damned depressing!).

Anyway, there were some silver linings to the clouds darkening the economic horizon.  read more »

It's a divorce that may soon dwarf the Brinkley-Cook debacle in ugliness.

The banking industry, pressured by regulators to reduce its exposure to the collapsing real estate market, has been squirming out of its loan obligations to developers, killing projects midstream, according to developers quoted in an article in today's Wall Street Journal:

"As lenders rush to curtail their real-estate exposure and preserve sorely needed capital, they are triggering lawsuits from builders that say the banks have unfairly cut off their construction financing, stopped their projects midstream and forced their companies to the brink of bankruptcy.

'Lender-liability lawsuits are coming. It's only just beginning,' says Michael Hackard, a lawyer in Sacramento, Calif.  read more »

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