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Landlords Face a $1.5 Trillion Commercial Real Estate Maturity Wall - Bloomberg

Apartment buildings, which make up about 40% of the looming maturities, are at the center of the refinancing wave, the broker says. Many US owners of the assets known as multifamily bought their properties using three-year floating rate loans during the easy money era. Interest rate increases since then have eaten up much of their rental income, making it a challenge to secure additional equity.

The Real Cost of New York City Office Real Estate

In separate research, Van Nieuwerburgh has extrapolated the economic consequences of this collapse in value for the health of cities, forecasting that a decline in property-tax revenue would create budget deficits for municipal governments that would lead to cuts in services like policing and trash collection, causing a deterioration in the quality of life. He calls this dynamic an “urban doom loop,” a phrase that has caught on. Van Nieuwerburgh told me that the city comptroller’s office had recently cited his analysis as a “doomsday” scenario. But even in the case of a 40 percent decline in values, the comptroller’s report found, the revenue decline would be modest in the short term — only around $1 billion by 2027. With a hint of amusement, Van Nieuwerburgh questioned that conclusion. “They call it sort of the worst-case scenario,” he said, “which I think is a misinterpretation of our paper. Our paper is not a worst-case scenario; it’s the median scenario.” If remote work persists at the current rate, he has projected a much larger tax hit to the city: around $6 billion a year.

Property Loans Are So Unappealing That Banks Want to Dump Them - Bloomberg

“Some banks have tested the market on office loans and they just can’t hit the numbers,” Zegen said. “There’s too much of a bid-ask spread, and there’s really nothing to talk about because agreeing to the lower pricing would make these banks more insolvent.”

The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant | The New Yorker

Restaurant investing tempts because it allows one to be part of a project that is taken seriously in places like the Times. You can’t own one-forty-second of the next Zadie Smith novel. Restaurant investing is also tempting because of its relatively low entry price, compared with, say, backing a movie. And it seduces because of a category error: I thought I knew something about the business of hospitality, just because guests at a dinner party once said nice things about my panzanella.

DailyKos: "Donald Trump was bailed out of bankruptcy by Russia crime bosses"

“You could say I was their exclusive broker,” he told Ria. “Then, in 2007-2008, dozens of Russians bought apartments in Trump properties in the US.” He later told ABC television that the Trump Organisation had received “hundreds of millions of dollars” through deals with Russian businessmen.

Donald Trump in New York: Deep Roots, but Little Influence - The New York Times

At Goldman Sachs, employees have directly contributed since 2013 more than $94,000 to Mrs. Clinton and more than $199,000 to one of Mr. Trump’s opponents in the Republican race, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, according to the commission. Records show just one Goldman employee, a financial adviser in the wealth management division, has donated to Mr. Trump — $534.58, to be precise. That employee’s name is Luke Thorburn. Public records show Mr. Thorburn trademarked the phrase “Make Christianity Great Again” and is selling hats that mirror Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps. Mr. Thorburn declined to comment.

Does gentrification lead to generification?

In the longer term, high commercial rents also damage what made neighborhoods like the West Village attractive and appealing to buyers and renters in the first place. One usually pays for distinction, and there is nothing distinct about a neighborhood where new businesses are national chains or safe, high-margin operations. The preservationist Jeremiah Moss, the author of the Vanishing New York blog, points out that Greenwich Village has been a bohemian center since the eighteen-fifties, but, since the rise in rents, it “no longer drives the culture,” and instead is becoming what James Howard Kunstler termed “a geography of nowhere.”

Urban Blight Comes to the West Village

Cafe Angelique reportedly closed when its sixteen-thousand-dollar rent increased to forty-two thousand dollars. A Gray’s Papaya on Eighth Street closed after its owner reported a rent increase of twenty thousand dollars per month.

Welcome to SubTropolis: The Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City - Bloomberg Business

The walls, carved out of 270-million-year-old limestone deposits, help keep humidity low and temperatures at a constant 68 degrees, eliminating the need for air conditioning or heating. Tenants have reported saving as much as 70 percent on their energy bills, says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Rents run about $2.25 per square foot, about half the going rate on the surface

This Sunlit Bushwick Loft Houses Family Art and Custom Woodworking

"When we first walked in, we both had the same instantaneous reaction," Venezia says. "It was exactly what we were looking for: open space, lots of sunlight, and in our price range. It was too good to be true."

The economics behind 432 Park Avenue

Keep in mind that these are pied-a-terres that begin at $7 million each and include several full-floor parcels in the $75 million range. More than anything else, this speaks to the insatiable appetite of the world’s greatly expanded billionaire class. Middle Eastern oil magnates, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and the Latin American aristocracy all have one thing in common: More money than they know what to do with and a desperation to get as much of it out of their home countries as possible. New York real estate works very well as both a facilitator of this as well as a store of value.
Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!
Take a typical one-bedroom walk-up, for example. In September, it rented for an average of $2,512 a month, the firm’s data show, but in October it fell to $2,326, or more than 7 percent. In November there was a further decline of nearly 2 percent, to $2,282, and in December yet another 2 percent slide, to $2,238. Last month, average rents slipped again, according to other firms’ data.
In central London, about 28 percent of home buyers in the two years to June didn’t live in the U.K., according to broker Knight Frank LLP. That rises to about 49 percent for new homes. In Greater London, 10 percent to 15 percent of new homes are bought by non-residents, Knight Frank estimated in October.
The average police officer in Oakland has 5 times as many violent crimes to deal with as one in San Francisco.
The average London house price will rise 44 per cent by 2018 to a dizzying £566,000, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. So, if I don’t hurry, my savings won’t even stretch to a deposit. Channel 4 has extended Location, Location, Location – a voyeuristic house-hunting show – to an hour from 30 minutes, understanding that property has become our nation’s unrivalled bread and circuses.
According to one survey around 70% of all offices in America have gone open-plan. Yet evidence is mounting that this is a bad idea. Over the past five years Gensler, a design firm, has asked more than 90,000 people in 155 companies in ten industries what they think of this way of working. It has found an astonishing amount of antipathy. Workers say that open-plan offices make it more difficult to concentrate, because the hubbub of human and electronic noise is so distracting. What they really value is the ability to focus on their jobs with as few distractions as possible. Ironically, going open-plan defeats another of Montessori management’s main objectives: workers say it prevents them from collaborating, because they cannot talk without disturbing others or inviting an audience. Other studies show that people who work in open-plan offices are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress and airborne infections such as flu.
So it appears that the future of the office is to provide a spectrum of noise and openness and to allow people to freely move around in it, instead of plunking people down in an open room with hard surfaces and factory-like noise and no where to escape. Consider the ends of the spectrum. At one end, a café-like open area with a variety of seating options, food and drink, and perhaps even Starbucks-like music playing. At the other, a library-like quiet and heads-down solitary work environment, with no talking and no cell phones. And in between a variety of alcoves, offices, and meeting spaces suitable for different sorts of intermediate co-working activities, like one-on-one work sessions, meetings, brainstorming, and project scrums.
“There are now twice as many studios and one-bedrooms available in Manhattan as there are three or more bedrooms,” said Beth Fisher, a senior managing director of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. “The ultratight market is forcing buyers to request combinations or seek out noncontiguous apartments.”
“For the bulk of the market, the 90 percent, it’s probably the most challenging period for a buyer in the 25-plus years that I’ve been observing the market,” Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, said in an interview. In the second quarter, 3,638 units priced at less than $3 million were listed for sale, the smallest nonluxury inventory in nine years, according to Miller. The absorption rate, or the amount of time it would take to sell all those properties at the current pace of deals, was 3.9 months, the fastest in records dating back to 2004. In Manhattan, where the median price for a two-bedroom apartment is $1.35 million and a three-bedroom unit costs $2.63 million, the nonluxury category encompasses many first-time and move-up buyers, Miller said. Nationally, the median price for single-family home in June was $214,200, according to the National Association of Realtors.
According to a 2012 report prepared by the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, seniors nationwide will try to sell up to 11.3 million housing units this decade, and up to 15 million more between 2020 and 2030, which “may result in a long period of slack housing demand in the Northeast and Midwest, beginning just in time for the recovery of national housing markets in the mid-2010s.”