Commercial Real Estate NYC

06/02/2024

A spectacular, multi-use mega-tower on the scale of One Vanderbilt will replace the run-down Roosevelt Hotel — once the migrants move out, that is. The hotel’s owner, the government of P…

26/01/2024

Hosted by Brian Sullivan, “Last Call” is a fast-paced, entertaining business show that explores the intersection of money, culture and policy. Tune in Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. ET on CNBC.

22/12/2023

A souring commercial real estate market has banks facing some $160 billion in losses on loans on these investment properties, according to a new report.

03/11/2023

Russian immigrant, co-founder of multifamily firm Schon Tepler, made his first housing investment when he was 23.

28/10/2023

11/08/2023

Knakal Knuggets™: Lessons Learned #33: It’s not the effort that matters; it’s where that effort is directed.

I love the expression, “We can only control our effort and our attitude.” While this is true, where we direct our effort is critically important.

If we think about all of the things we do each day, we can disaggregate all of those activities into three different buckets:

1️⃣ what is an essential revenue producing activity,
2️⃣ what is necessary but not critical and can be delegated to others,
3️⃣ what we do that is not important and should not be doing.

Our essential revenue producing activities should be our focus and the majority of our efforts should be directed towards those activities. Prospecting is one of those essential activities that should definitely fall into that bucket. Transaction implementation and ex*****on are another.

It is also important to determine which activities can be done by others and can be, and should be, delegated. In order to do this effectively, we need to make sure we have the proper support team around us to handle all of those tasks.

And then it is even more important to minimize, or eliminate, the time spent on low value tasks that don’t need to be done.

Most studies show that 20% of the tasks we do are truly essential, while 80% can either be delegated or eliminated. While this may not be what you are experiencing, it is something to consider and we should be very concerned with how we are spending our time and what we are doing.

So we are in complete control of our effort but also need the discipline to make sure that effort is directed on the most essential tasks.

27/06/2023

05/04/2023

It's getting harder for landlords to rake in wealth, an NYC real estate investor said on the Odd Lots podcast. He's switching to "safer" investments.

23/03/2023

NY1 got exclusive remarks from the winner.

15/02/2023

Eastdil Secured is going through a round of layoffs as the investment banking firm deals with the slowdown in commercial real estate sales. Eastdil is laying off about 7 percent of its global staff, according to sources familiar with the cuts. The number of affected employees could not be immediatel...

15/02/2023

Given the uncertainty in the market today, many owners have indicated an unwillingness to put fresh capital into existing properties.

15/02/2023

Not Just a Fluke

After last week’s Testimonial Tuesday, I received a couple of emails telling me that the 50% difference I came up with in value for the site at 31st & Eighth was a fluke. A "one-time event" and essentially that I got "lucky."

However, I maintain that it was the market expertise and the specialization that put my team and I in a position to know the market better than anyone else and that market knowledge was the thing that enabled us to know the market so much better than the competition.

To show that it was not a "one-time thing" and not a fluke, I present another example from the same time period in which we gave a client a valuation a 50% higher than all of the competition. Again, this was at a time when our market share exposed us to many more data points than the competition had. We knew the market cold and knew where the market had progressed to when others were still living in the past.

A good client of ours, Parsons School of Design - The New School, owned the site at the northwest corner of 40th Street & Seventh Avenue. The buildable footage was about 100,000 buildable square feet. The School reached out to us to provide a valuation as they did with several other firms. Based upon our work on two dozen sites in Manhattan and the work we did on the site at 31st & Eighth, we told the school that their site was worth $600 pbsf. They initially laughed at us as four other firms told them the site was worth $400 pbsf. We explained that we knew the market better and reviewed all of the real-time data we had. The school hired us and we kicked ass, getting them over $620 pbsf, demonstrating that nothing in the world can compete with up-to-the-minute market data.

See what the real estate director at The New School had to say about our efforts:

“When we decided to sell 560 Seventh Avenue, we interviewed several of the top brokerage firms in town. All of the firms told us the value of the property was approximately $40 million. Bob Knakal and his sales team told us the site was worth $60 million. At first, we were skeptical but Bob was able to clearly articulate his methodology and we decided to go with him. As you can imagine, my Board and I are extremely pleased with our $62.3 million sales price. I highly recommend Bob and his team, and, in fact, we are already working on another transaction together.”

Roy Moskowitz, Parsons - The New School for Design
560 Seventh Avenue
Sold for: $62,305,000

03/02/2023

Okada & Company has been hired as the leasing agent for two office properties in Midtown and one in Midtown South.

03/02/2023

Scott Rechler ploughed billions of dollars into Manhattan office properties after the 2008 financial crisis, amassing one of the city’s biggest portfolios through a flurry of deals. Now Rechler, the chief executive of property developer RXR, is preparing to surrender some of his offices to lenders.

A new era of remote work and rising interest rates has changed the equation for some developers

01/09/2022

Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle and other private-equity giants are going all-in on New York rentals — albeit with different playbooks.

25/08/2022

Gaia Real Estate bought the Brooklyn building from Hope Street Capital

17/08/2022

02/08/2022

Carlyle Group's Brooklyn strategy of many, smaller deals, is rare in the private equity world which usually sees massive deals.