New York's ‘Queen of Mean’ leaves $12 million to dog

Leona Helmsley, the late US hotel billionaire known as the "Queen of Mean," has lived up to her reputation even in death, cutting two grandchildren out of her will and leaving $12 million to her dog. Trouble, a white Maltese, received the largest bequest from Helmsley's will, which was read out in a New York court on Tuesday. The will sets aside a trust to care for the pampered pooch, which once starred in advertisements for Helmsley's hotel chain, and also stipulates that the dog be buried beside her and her late husband, Harry, who died in 1997.

At $120.5M, NYC Office Sale is Double 2005 Acquisition Price

With New York City’s low cap rates, high financing costs and slowing rental growth rates weighing on its mind, APF Properties has decided to sell the 132,000-square-foot Manhattan office building at 1414 Avenue of The Americas. David Werner and Murray Hill Properties will acquire the asset for $120.5 million, or $912 per square foot.

A NY Real Estate Dealmaker Who Deals in Playgrounds

One of the projects she worked on was Take the Field, a pubic/ private partnership of real estate developer Preston Robert "Bob" Tisch that works to refurbish football fields and baseball diamonds in city parks. Said Ms. Wenner: "I was living near an elementary school at the time and thought to myself, ‘Why can't this be done on the primary school level?

Apartment buyers in NY threaten to sue Tshuva

Dozens of apartment buyers in Israeli businessman Yitzhak Tshuva's luxury project in Manhattan threaten to launch legal proceedings against the developer, El Ad Properties, the New York Times reported Sunday. El Ad Group is Tshuva's private company and is in charge of his real estate activity in the United States. According to the report, six months after the buyers started moving into the glassy new condominium tower called the Link at 310 West 52nd Street., they are still living in a construction site with an unfinished lobby, uncarpeted hallways and no access to the garden that was supposed to help them escape from the city’s stresses.

Manhattan Real Estate Record Hits Hurdle

The purchase of the 321,000-square-foot office building, at the corner of East 57th Street, is only the latest of several high-profile deals that are in turmoil. Metropolitan Real Estate Investors, an Israeli investment group, only just closed on its acquisition of the Lipstick Building at 885 Third Ave. and 292 Madison Ave. after struggling to secure permanent financing, and Harry Macklowe is reportedly in trouble with his $7 billion acquisition of several Manhattan skyscrapers from the Blackstone Group.

Pace slows for Manhattan apartment rentals

Manhattan's overheated rental market is beginning to cool off, according to a new report issued by The Real Estate Group, a local brokerage firm. The report found rents decreasing in all kinds of units throughout the city, except for studio apartments in doorman buildings and two-bedroom apartments in non-doorman buildings. The report goes against the trend that the rental market typically tightens at the end of the summer as families take vacation time to look for new homes, and students and recent graduates with new jobs flood the city.

Developer’s Big Manhattan Move Faces a Time and Credit Squeeze

Harry Macklowe, the New York developer, was flying high in February when he decided to buy a portfolio of prime Midtown Manhattan office towers for nearly $7 billion, using only $50 million of his own money. But as the crisis over subprime residential mortgages spills over into other real estate sectors, causing a severe tightening of credit, there is widespread talk in the industry that Mr. Macklowe is in deep trouble — so much so that he could lose control not only of the newly acquired portfolio but also of the G.M. Building and other properties that were used as collateral for short-term debt that must be repaid six months from now.

Real estate mogul Leona Helmsley dies at 87

Leona was born in upstate New York and raised in Brooklyn. Before rising to real estate fame and fortune, Helmsely worked various part-time jobs and did some modeling gigs. She then married Harry Helmsley in 1972 and helped him amass a commercial and residential real estate empire worth billions. She also served time in prison for tax fraud and made headlines for her statement that "only little people pay taxes."

New York City real estate prices have increased from the beginning of the year

The average price of Manhattan apartments has also shown some gains from the beginning of this year, though it is down a little from a year ago. The average price in the second quarter was $1.33 million, which is an 8% increase from the beginning of the year. According to a report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel, as noted in The Real Deal, Manhattan sales numbers jumped dramatically from a year ago. Looking at these numbers, it looks as if the city’s residential sales are continuing to show a good market. The number of Manhattan sales jumped in the second quarter of 2007, from 1,934 a year ago to 3,939 transactions this year. That number also shows a 13.4% jump from the first quarter of this year.

Manhattan defying real estate downturn

"Manhattan is up quarter-over-quarter," said Daniel Baum, chief operating officer of the Real Estate Group of New York, a residential brokerage firm. "Prices are up, there are still plenty of buyers and less inventory compared to the rest of the country."
"The main point of why Manhattan has been spared is that it has a draw that no other place in this country has," Baum said. "Not only from here but from around the world. Manhattan is one of the only places in the world where people from all over the world want to live.

Harlem real estate

The heart of Harlem is being reshaped - some say gutted - in a blitz of big-money real-estate deals, starting with nearly a dozen small shops getting squeezed out to make way for retail and office development. "Harlem will be gone," lamented Lanise Benjamin, whose 90-year-old grandfather's legendary music shop, Bobby's Happy House, is being evicted from Frederick Douglass Boulevard. "To tear this building down would essentially be to tear Harlem apart."

Vision Group developing Brooklyn condo project

Vision Real Estate Group, owned by Amir Yerushalmi, is developing the Greenpoint Lofts business condominium project in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for $22 million. The project has 68 offices. Soaring rents in New York, where 95% of offices are rented, has resulted in a new trend of business condominiums, or commercial condominiums, in which offices can be purchased, rather than leased. A business condominium can be purchased for half the price of an apartment condominium, and real estate experts predict that the business condominium will become an increasingly important niche market in the coming years.

Fast forward to today's real estate market

"The New York real estate market started to experience problems in the late 1980s that extended into the early 1990s," he explains. "With the exuberance the real estate markets have experienced in the past few years, people tend to forget that real estate prices actually declined in value in the early '90s. I remember units in my Upper West Side co-op building declining by about 30 to 40 percent from mid '80s peak to the early '90s trough. There was a confluence of factors that caused this depressed real estate market, including tax reforms that reversed tax policies favorable to real estate assets, oversupply that resulted from overbuilding fueled by easy money, an unprecedented wave of co-op conversions, and what eventually turned to a liquidity crisis."

Donald Trump : New York Real Estate May Be Vulnerable

New York City's real estate market is still booming -- but "that may change at a moment's notice," said Donald Trump in an interview with CNBC. The billionaire developer told CNBC's Erin Burnett that despite the weakening housing market across the U.S., "certain small luxury niches" remain strong, including Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla. The Gotham market "is stronger than I've ever seen it," Trump said, adding, "but next week, I may have an entirely different story."

Eventual sale of housing complex looms over Starrett City tenants

On the other side is a large group of investors, including Donald Trump, who have made millions in one of the sweetest real estate deals in New York City. Many of them want to cash out - and make, at a minimum, another $500 million. The investors' desire to sell has tenants of the sprawling Brooklyn housing development, with its 5,880 apartments over 140 acres, fearing that a sale at a high price will mean evictions or big rent hikes.

The Coming Death of Smith Street

A few years ago chefs in Manhattan with dreams of opening their own restaurants and finding enough kitchen space to do a proper job were turning to Smith Street in Boerum Hill for what they needed at reasonable rents. Smith Street has now become so celebrated as a strip for good eating that the chains are moving in, upping the rents to unaffordability for local operations and transforming a place of distinctive character into one more agglomeration of the usual that you can find everywhere else.

Real Estate Developers Accused Of $27 Million Fraud

Two individuals, purporting to be working through a Manhattan real estate development company, have been arrested in connection with an elaborate scheme to defraud approximately 70 individuals of over $27 million. Working through The Kingsland Group Inc. and related entities, the duo allegedly fraudulently induced approximately 70 individuals to loan them, in the aggregate, over $27 million, purportedly to fund the renovation of approximately 16 multi-family apartment buildings located in upper Manhattan, according to federal prosecutors. As part of the fraud, Hershkowitz and Woolf-Turk allegedly falsely represented that the investor victims would hold, as collateral for the loans, interests in bona fide first mortgages in the various properties in which they thought they were investing. In fact, the investor victims did not hold recorded, first mortgages in the properties.

HOME PRICES CONTINUE STEEP CLIMB THROUGHOUT

Condominium and co-op prices rose 8 percent in citywide sales for the second quarter of 2007, according to a report by the Real Estate Board of New York. Unsurprisingly, Manhattan came in first with a $1.2 million average apartment sales price – up from $1.14 million last year – while Brooklyn was a distant second at $484,000, up from $443,000. Meanwhile, the median sales price for city apartments climbed 16 percent to $525,000. The average price per square foot for a Manhattan apartment increased 5 percent to $1,083, while Brooklyn and Queens came in second and third at $524 and $357. “The report clearly demonstrates that, while everyone knows the Manhattan market continues to be strong, the boroughs outside Manhattan are bucking the trend in the rest of the country and seeing solid increases in home prices.