Category : Featured

By Liana GreyAs Atlantic Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s hot new retail corridors, passes through Boerum Hill, immigrant and hipster cultures converge. On one side of the block that stretches from Nevins Street to Flatbush Avenue, where the Barclay Center, Forest City Ratner’s new Nets arena, is under construction, there are Islamic bookshops, a mosque, and other remnants of the neighborhood’s past as an Arab enclave.

By Daniel GeigerThe Starrett-Lehigh Building, a large office building on Manhattan’s far West Side, is being acquired by RXR Realty, according to multiple sources familiar with the transaction. The company, which has been an active buyer of Manhattan office buildings in recent months, is said to be paying around $900 million, a figure that would make the sale one of the highest-priced commercial office deals in the city this year.

By Daniel GeigerPan Brothers Associates, a real estate investment company with a portfolio of buildings concentrated in the Flatiron District and Chelsea, has purchased 25 West 23rd Street for $5.65 million according to sources. The five story building has a Chock full o’Nuts coffee shop in its ground floor retail space, an acting school called The Studio on the second floor and two residential rental apartments on the floors above, one of which is vacant.

By Roland LiBrokerage Mark Zborovsky & Co, Inc. has closed on two sales of unsold residential sponsor units in Brooklyn. An 86-unit block in the Clinton Hill Co-op Corporation, a 1,213-unit property that is one of the largest in the borough, sold for around $7 million. The price was around 30% of its vacant market value, which is approximately $28 million. The 86 units, which are rent-stabilized, have an annual cash shortfall of roughly $80,000.

By Roland LiA mixed-use building at 1032-1034 Lexington Avenue has sold for $10.1 million, according to city records. The three-story building is roughly 12,000 s/f, including a 3,373 s/f basement. The ground floor commercial space and kitchen of the property is currently vacant. It was previously occupied by Payard Patisserie & Bistro, which closed in July 2009 after 12 years in the location. Owner Francois Payard told Crain's at the time that an impending rent increase of around 60% prompted the closure.

By Daniel GeigerThe Laboz brothers are close to acquiring the mortgage and deed to 408 Broadway, a roughly 75,000 s/f property in Soho for around $32 million, according to sources. The building was purchased in 2008 by the New Jersey-based real estate investment firm Vanick Properties for $29 million, according to city records. In August of that year, Vanick leased the five story building’s 14,300 s/f fourth floor to the music publication Spin Magazine. It appears, however, that the building eventually went into default.

By Daniel GeigerArup, a structural and construction engineering firm, is in talks to move its downtown headquarters to 77 Water Street, according to sources. The company, which was founded in England after World War II and has offices around the globe, currently has its New York headquarters at 155 Sixth Avenue, a building in Lower Manhattan owned by Trinity Real Estate, the real estate arm of the Trinity Church. Arup’s lease is set to expire in the building in 2014. The space at 77 Water Street is being sublet by Goldman Sachs, which leased nearly the entire 600,000 s/f building several years ago, but reconsidered the space and decided to sublease instead.

By Daniel GeigerManhattan asking rents have begun to bounce back slowly from precipitous declines during the recession, but leasing executives at the real estate services company CB Richard Ellis say that segments of the market have begun to tighten at a faster pace than the overall statistics indicate. “Some of the assumptions at the macro level about how the market moves do not apply equally to the markets within the market,” said Matthew Van Buren, an executive managing director at CBRE who oversees the company’s midtown brokerage operations.