April 19, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for minute interview

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview — Elizabeth F. Stribling

January 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The company, which was started in 1980, specializes in high-end residential properties, including developments like the Plaza Private Residences and the Devonshire House in Greenwich Village.

Interview conducted and condensed by

VIVIAN MARINO

Q. What kind of year did you have in 2011?

A. People were generally nervous — nervous about buying — and so there was a lot of hand-holding, but it was a steady market. There were a lot of higher-end sales. I don’t think that the overall market was a lot stronger in 2011 than it was in 2010.

Q. Can you provide any numbers?

A. It’s hard to measure, because for us at Stribling, 2010 was a very strong year.

Q. What’s your outlook for 2012?

A. I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s probably going to be a fairly flat year, much like 2011. There are too many fears about the global economy that will keep a temper on things. On the other hand, I have to tell you the demand is out there for new development offerings.

Q. Which new developments are you involved with right now?

A. We’re working on a building at 130 West 12th Street, which is a conversion of a 1920s building being developed by the Rudin family. In the two months that we’ve had it on, we sold 32 out of the 42 units.

We just finished the Devonshire House at 28 East 10th Street. We’ve got about three apartments left in that building. We had 62 units there. They came on in various stages, and in each stage we sold them out in about four to six months. And we also just finished the sky lofts at 145 Hudson Street.

We’re now embarking on three projects on the Upper East Side in the 70s and 80s. The developers on one are the developers of the Devonshire House, and the developers on the other — I’m really not at liberty to say until it’s officially announced. We’ve got another project in the works at Henry Street on the corner of Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights that will open up this spring, and we’ve got one in the East 50s on the design table that will be opening up in 2013.

Q. You sound really busy.

A. I never quite understood this idea of a shadow inventory — supposedly the apartments that hadn’t been leased in developments. I thought, well, when the market turned down, they will be rented and they’ll come on slowly — which is exactly what’s happening now. The demand for new product and the latest is really out there.

Q. What do buyers want?

A. They’re looking for simplicity of life, and what that means is not all the bells and whistles of amenities but simply apartments that have a good layout and good clean lines. People want simple or elegant.

Q. Where are the strongest markets in New York?

A. We saw a lot of action on the West Side and downtown, and the demand for Brooklyn continues. Probably the neighborhood that is the least in favor right now is the Upper East Side, especially the far east 80s and 90s.

Q. Where are the emerging neighborhoods?

A. The area that used to be called the Garment Center — there are a lot of lofts down there that people are buying. I think that Chinatown is burgeoning into NoLIta. And certainly Wall Street in terms of being populated by residential dwellers. Where we did a lot of sales is around the High Line. The High Line was very, very hot.

Q. Are you seeing a lot of foreign interest?

A. Generally, you have a solid base of about 15 percent of the buyers; now probably one-third of all the condominium deals we do are with foreigners. The Russians are looking for trophy properties. The Chinese are looking for pieds-à-terre near universities for their college-age kids. The Brazilians are looking for something around the High Line, kind of glamorous.

Q. Do you deal with many celebrity clients?

A. On my birth certificate my middle name is Elizabeth French Stribling. In my professional life it’s Elizabeth Discretion Stribling.

Q. Is your family French?

A. My grandmother’s maiden name was “French,” so it’s a family name. Interestingly enough, I’m the chairman of the French Heritage Society, a great Francophile. I have a home in the south of France and an apartment in Paris. I speak French and it’s just, perhaps, a happy coincidence.

Q. I understand you’re also an excellent French cook.

A. I studied with Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, Simone Beck, James Beard — they gave me private lessons. Julia Child made fabulous chocolate cakes glazed in dark chocolate. She made one with crushed nuts in it and sprinkled with bourbon. She liked bourbon.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9ea71db965f39732bed8120b049bd1f8

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: Michael F. McNally

October 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Mr. McNally also serves on the senior executive team of Skanska AB of Sweden, the parent company. Skanska USA is involved in several projects in the city, including the rebuilding at the World Trade Center.

Interview conducted and condensed by VIVIAN MARINO

Q Skanska USA recently moved its headquarters to the Empire State Building, becoming one of the first big tenants there since its renovation.

A Yes, we’re one of the first single-floor tenants. We have somewhere near 25,000 square feet, all on the 32nd floor. We moved in almost exactly two years ago.

The space is LEED platinum. Green actually saves you money as long as you look in terms of life cycle, like any investor would. We save about 50 percent of our energy here over what we spent at our former space on Madison Avenue, which was about the same size.

Q What is the rent per square foot?

A I think it’s about $50. We have a 15-year lease.

Q So how is business?

A Good. Our backlog is up; the work that we have in front of us has increased. We’re working on over 1,000 projects right now. We are very happy with where we are, but very nervous about where things are headed.

Q How much of your business is in New York?

A Skanska worldwide does about $18- to $19 billion worth of work. We do about $5.5 billion every year in the United States, and somewhere around $2 billion of that is in New York. We’ve got 33 offices around the country; New York by far is the biggest. Of the 1,000 projects, I would say 100 of that is in New York.

Q Let’s talk about some of these projects.

A We’re the construction managers for the Brooklyn Bridge Park. We’re rehabbing the Brooklyn Bridge — repainting, redoing the surfaces in the ramps. That started about a year ago. I think it’s maybe about a year away from completion.

We’re doing two things at the World Trade Center: the underground part of the PATH station, then the steel on the Calatrava entrance hall. We’re also working at the United Nations; the U.N. for whatever reason doesn’t like us talking about it. The No. 7 subway line extension was another job we got this year.

Some of the other big ones: the Croton Water Filtration Plant in the Bronx and the Catskill/Delaware Water Treatment Plant in Westchester. We finished the new Meadowlands stadium a year ago.

Q Do you root for the Jets or Giants there?

A You don’t want to print that! I’m a Patriots fan.

Q Skanska built Gillette Stadium, too, in Foxborough, Mass.

 

A Yes.

Q Was that your most memorable project?

A As a sports fan, I loved all the stadiums, especially the Gillette Stadium experience, for the Patriots.

Q Are you doing any new commercial developments in New York?

A We only started the commercial development unit a couple of years ago in four cities: Seattle, Houston, D.C. and Boston.

New York is tough from a development standpoint because there’s a lot of competition, so we didn’t try to do that here. If the right opportunity comes up, we will jump in.

The thing for us that has made the commercial development part of our business work is that we don’t borrow money. We use our own money. That’s allowed us to get a toehold in markets.

Q What happens after the developments go up?

A We’ll sell them, mainly to institutional investors who are looking for a return. What we’ll do is, we’ll build them and then we’ll lease them out completely and then we will sell them.

Q Switching gears, about a year ago there was a federal investigation of fraud by one of Skanska USA’s business units in public works projects.

A It had to do with the use of disadvantaged business enterprises as subcontractors. We wound up settling with the Department of Justice for around $19 million. Believe me, we’ll never have that issue ever again!

Q Do you travel to Sweden often?

A About every other month.

Q Do you understand the language?

A A little bit. I bought the Rosetta Stone program, and then I would go to some meetings very proud that I knew a sentence or two and they would all laugh. So I gave up.

Q Say something in Swedish.

A Drick vatten. Drink water.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4eed3a2afbd562d6607180762113fa51

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: Thomas Z. Scarangello

September 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The company is known for skyscrapers and sports facilities; its projects have included 11 Times Square, the new Meadowlands stadium, and Yankee Stadium. It was also hired for the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia, billed as the next building to be the world’s tallest.

Q According to your bio, you’ve spent your entire career at Thornton Tomasetti.

A It was my first job out of school — I was hired as an entry-level engineer. I didn’t think I would be there for the rest of my career, but I got lucky that two things occurred: that structural engineering turned out to be my passion, and that the firm grew the right way for me. I never hit a wall; if I wanted to try something new, there weren’t barriers.

Q And that has included forensic work.

A One of my first projects was at the Hartford Coliseum, which collapsed in the late ’70s. More recently, we got a call to help start the investigation into the stage collapse at the state fair in Indianapolis.

Sometimes the work is in a disaster area, and sometimes a building is just in distress. From every natural disaster, and even man-made ones, you always come out with lessons.

Q Do you know yet what happened in Indianapolis?

A Clearly there was strong wind that precipitated something. Whether it was a level of wind that no one anticipated or some flaw, that’s why we get called in to get a better understanding and avoid these things in the future.

Q Switching to New York, how did the city’s high-rise buildings hold up during the recent tropical storm?

A They held up well. Building curtain walls also fared well, with a few exceptions of leaks from wind-driven rain. It would take a much stronger event to significantly impact the high-rise building stock.

Q One of Thornton Tomasetti’s specialties is skyscrapers. How do you ensure that these buildings are safe and secure from an engineering standpoint?

A You look at the strength characteristics — you want all the structural components of the building to be strong enough to respond to the largest forces, whatever that might be. In certain parts of the world the dominant force may be seismic forces, and in other parts it might be hurricane winds or other events. So we have to determine what’s the largest force that this building is going to feel. There’s a whole series of checks that we have to do.

We also work very closely with geotechnical engineers who test the soil conditions, and we do borings and other things. And we’re constantly evaluating different materials, whether it’s steel or concrete.

Q Have you ever worked with an architect who got too carried away in his or her designs?

A I hate to say it, but that’s the challenge. That’s what we love. We don’t do a lot of very standard 20-story rectilinear buildings.

Q How many projects are you working on right now?

A Well over 100. Our project starts are up around 20 percent over the same time last year.

New York is probably around 5 percent of the projects. I’m the engineer of record for the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. And I’m working on the Hudson Yards right now.

Q Let’s talk about Hudson Yards.

A We’re working with Related and KPF, the architect. Things are definitely ramping up, so we take that as a positive sign.

We’ve been kind of on and off working on the site since the mid-’90s. We studied that site for a baseball stadium. We were on when the Jets talked about doing their stadium there. And then we worked with the city when they started doing the whole planning for the yards, helping them, because it’s a complicated site with the building over an active rail yard, so there’s a lot of structural challenges.

Q How big is your sports stadium business?

A It’s probably about 15 percent of what we’re doing. The first sports project that I worked on was in 1990 — it was an arena in Anaheim, Calif. — and I probably personally worked on 20 to 30 between the time we did that project and we did the recent ones in New York.

In New York, we had all these older stadiums that hadn’t been renovated, so when they finally started to come online, people would walk in and go, “Wow, look at this!” Well, you should have gone to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Anaheim or San Francisco…

Q Do you have a favorite project?

A A boy from the Bronx who gets to be the engineer of record for Yankee Stadium — it doesn’t quite get better than that!

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9d2b6113c6a3cb81e6c7cb63841d8737

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: Earle S. Altman

July 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Before starting ABS Partners, in 2000, Mr. Altman spent 40 years at Helmsley-Spear, where he managed the company’s sales and leasing divisions.

Q So what was it like working for Harry Helmsley?

A He was a wonderful boss. You’d walk in to see him and you’d have a list — you’d better, because if you just rambled, you’d be out — and he’d look at the list and say, ‘That’s O.K., that’s O.K.,’ and then he might say, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure that’s right.’

If I said I really think we should do this, invariably he’d say, ‘If that’s what you think is right, then you do what you think is right.’ So you’d walk out and say, ‘Holy Cow! He thinks I know what I’m doing!’ Then you went out and you did it — twice as good! He had no patience for incompetents or bumblers.

Q What was your most memorable deal at Helmsley-Spear?

A 380 Second Avenue, the corner of 22nd Street — a 200,000-square-foot building. In 1964, I was offered a 13 percent interest in the building. I didn’t have any money, and I went to Mr. Helmsley and explained to him that I was going to find a partner. He looked at me in his straightforward way and said, ‘Would you consider me as your partner?’ I still have my 13 percent.

Q Did you know Leona well?

A We were friends. She was a lot of kicks when we all went out. She was very, very attractive and very sexy when she was younger. This was a lot of years ago.

Q But you saw right through her?

A Yeah. She was with Brown Harris Stevens, and she had an appointment to see Harry. She sashayed into my office with a cigarette, and I said, ‘That’s not what’s going to interest Harry B. Helmsley. That’s not his game. He’s all business.’ She followed that to a T and ended up marrying him.

In the end, the history of Harry B. Helmsley is not that of Harry B. Helmsley. People only remember Leona, which is very sad.

Q Let’s move on now to your current company. How is business?

A Excellent. We have close to five million square feet of buildings that we manage, and we have interests in many of those buildings. We don’t own anything by ourselves. We always set up groups — like the one that just bought the retail portion of 222 Park Avenue South, at 18th Street. That closed a couple of months ago.

Q You already have a tenant for that property, right?

A We leased it to Rothman’s, the corner tenant here at 200 Park Avenue South. They’re going to move one block north, and instead of having 9,000 feet, they’re going to have 11,000 feet — 6,500 feet on the ground floor. They’re building it now. That frees up this store at 200 Park.

Q Did you get a good deal at 222 Park?

A We paid a fair market value. Interestingly, it was first put on the market in the mid-$20 million range by a major brokerage firm, and then it was reduced gradually over a three-year period. And there was interest when it was $10 million. I asked to meet with the sellers. In the end we paid $8.9 million — all cash.

Q What else are you working on?

A We bought a building in downtown New Rochelle, a theater and offices. The theater’s vacant. It’s 24,000 square feet with a 40-foot ceiling and no columns, so the plan is to rent it to studios.

We’re also marketing a building in Chinatown. We have the corner of Canal and Lafayette. It’s a one-story, and it’s zoned for five stories. It’s a pedestrian-heavy corner, and so what we really want to do is net lease the land to somebody, a bank or a retailer. You can build five times the land area.

In Harlem, we have land that starts on 125th and has access to 126th, near Columbia University. We are considering a hotel. I need to get it rezoned — it’s now zoned for one-story factories.

Q What’s the occupancy rate on the properties you manage or have an interest in?

A We’re probably 95 percent occupancy across the board.

Q And rental rates?

A About $35 to $60 a square foot.

Q What do you like to do in your spare time?

A I build stone walls. I have 2.7 acres in Harrison, N.Y., and I have a Ford 150 pickup, a 16-pound sledgehammer and goggles. On a weekend I break rock, get rock and build my wall. It’s about three feet high.

I’m about two-thirds finished, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years. When you do it a rock at a time, it takes a long time.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=34b57c1c55e7db5fbe1b06cc7c1a2cf7

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: Tom Lebling

July 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Equity Residential owns and manages several high-rise rental buildings in the New York area, including Trump Place, 71 Broadway and the Brooklyner. The company is now constructing TEN23 near the High Line.

Q You’ve been in this job for almost a year now.

A Primarily I’m responsible for the day-to-day operations of our properties in the Northeast, and that includes D.C., Boston, and, of course, New York and New Jersey. In the whole area we have about 110 properties; it’s about 31,000 individual apartments. New York City is about 15 properties, about 4,500 individual apartments, and then we have about four properties in Jersey City, which make up about another 1,500 apartments. So this area contributes quite a bit to our bottom line.

Q How is this area faring?

A New York is doing extremely well, which is in line with our expectations. It’s a combination of a lot of different things: low new supply coming into the market, hiring in the financial sectors and tourism picking up.

Q What is your average occupancy rate portfoliowide?

A In New York, we are sitting between 96 and 97 percent, which is a little bit better than prior years.

Q And rental rates?

A They are up from a year ago. Percentagewise I’d say we’re in the mid-single digits. And renewals are pretty strong.

Q What is that average rate?

A In our portfolio we retain about 60 percent of our residents.

Q Have you stopped offering concessions like other landlords?

A We have pretty much eliminated concessions on every one of our New York properties. And that’s also true of broker fees.

A few years ago we offered at least a month free and we paid the broker fees. That was probably the norm.

Q Demand appears to be strong for rentals. Why?

A It’s really the freedom of renting. People are finding that owning a home isn’t like it was 20 or 30 years ago when they saw it as an asset. People aren’t seeing the growth in the value of the property the way they used to, so they’re opting to rent. And oftentimes you can take a step up when you’re renting compared to what you can afford to buy — you can get something a little nicer.

Q What’s the status of TEN23?

A We are in the final phases of construction — just a few more months left to go, and we’ll start leasing towards the fourth quarter. People will start moving in in the first quarter of next year.

It’s just over 100 units. We offer studios, ones and twos, and the finishes are top of the line. You’re going to get some incredible outdoor space that overlooks the High Line. In my opinion it’s one of the hotter neighborhoods.

Q What will the rents be?

A Studios are starting in the low $3,000s per month. One-bedrooms will be renting in the $4,000s and two-bedrooms in the high $5,000s to low $6,000s.

Q That sounds pretty steep.

A Once you see the finished product the demand will be there.

Q Has Equity made changes to the three buildings it bought from Harry Macklowe, in Chelsea, Midtown and Sutton Place?

A We bought those buildings about a year and a half ago. That was a tremendous deal for us — the timing was perfect.

We’re maintaining them as rentals. We’re doing some minor renovations — nothing too large — like a couple of hallway renovations, a fitness-center renovation, and I think we’re renovating a few of the interiors. But the units themselves were in great shape. Mr. Macklowe did a great job developing and managing those properties.

Q Are you looking at any distressed opportunities now?

A We’ve been doing that for quite some time. But a lot of times those deals don’t pencil out the way we want them to. Once you start crunching the numbers, they’re not as great as they seem.

Q Do you have many dealings with Sam Zell, the chairman?

A I’ve met him a few times, but I don’t deal with him much. He’s involved in a tremendous amount of business dealings around the world, actually. Equity Residential is obviously one of his companies, but he’s not that involved in the day-to-day operations.

Q Do you live in an Equity apartment?

A We live in 71 Broadway. It’s a two-bedroom. We moved in last July when we relocated from Miami. A few weeks ago I got my renewal, and I was involved in setting the new rates.

It’s helped me view our business from a different angle.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f72e485f93e6a6059ee7077d45ca83b4

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: John J. Cuticelli Jr.

June 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Cuticelli, 60, is the chief executive of Sheldon Good Company, one of the country’s oldest real estate auction houses. The company was acquired almost two years go by Racebrook Capital, a private equity firm that he controls.

Mr. Cuticelli has moved Sheldon Good’s headquarters to New York, and this year held residential auctions in Washington Heights and in Queens.

Q What changes have been made since the acquisition?

A The primary changes were to take the deep history of the company and figure out what that meant statistically — so that we can try to predict a relative range of value. The founders had cataloged in journals, by hand, every single auction, including how the property performed before it was auctioned, why it was auctioned, what happened, and then a postmortem. How do you take 40 years of data and put it into a formulaic computer program?

Q So how did you?

A We hired grad students, semester after semester for the last five semesters, to go through all the information. It was a very good learning experience for them. There was really no other way for us to do it without sending it to a service, and at that point we couldn’t maintain control.

Q And what have you learned?

A Until we prove true price discovery, things will just languish.

Q What about New York?

A In any down cycle, one of the beautiful things about New York is that it’s the last to leave and the first to come back. I hate to state the obvious, but this is the center for jobs and the financial universe. The closer you are to the center of Manhattan, the less distress and troubles you see.

Q Is that why there aren’t many auctions in Manhattan?

A When you look at the 13 auctions that we’ve conducted in the greater New York market in the last 18 months, you’ll see they’re nearly all in the boroughs and New Jersey. Because the cost of entry and of construction are so high in Manhattan, it’s just not as overbuilt as the boroughs. But there are a few buildings.

Q Can you elaborate?

A Yes, we are working with a number of fiduciaries — lenders or equity holders — in Manhattan. We’re the auction company for the mezzanine debt on the MAve Hotel, at 62 Madison. It’s supposed to be June 29.

Q In February you auctioned condos in Washington Heights and Long Island City. Were you satisfied with the results?

A In Washington Heights, 22 units were sold at auction; 20 closed, and we sold 2 or 3 post-auction. It was a good way to sell the building out with 75 percent of the former asking price.

Long Island City was a very interesting result in that the asking price on a never-before-sold unit was $600 a square foot and we sold it at auction at $474. We sold 18 units at auction. One of the things we’ve proven is that the auction has set a floor, not a ceiling. You’ll see today they’re going for $550 a square foot.

Q On average, how much savings can buying via auction bring?

A Nationwide, we’re seeing people buy things at about 65 percent of the former asking price. In the New York area it’s closer to 75 to 80 percent.

Q How important is the New York market to Sheldon Good?

A The actual sale of Manhattan real estate is not instrumental. But the ability to be near lenders and the financial markets and have easy access to them is important. I spend 10,000 miles a month in an airplane, and 90 percent of what I go and look at is what I’ve been able to mine here.

Q What synergies have been realized by placing Sheldon Good under the Racebrook umbrella?

A Racebrook, the fund, does a lot of debtor-in-possession financing, so when a real estate transaction goes into bankruptcy, Racebrook Capital provides the finances that a real estate entity needs to go into bankruptcy, then the court awards a disposition process, usually an auction. If we provide the financing, then Sheldon Good is the auction company.

Q What’s the breakdown between residential and commercial?

A Typically, 60 percent of what we do is commercial; 40 percent is residential. However, nationwide, in the last 18 months, 60 percent of the 73 auctions we conducted were residential-based and 40 percent were commercial. The statistics are a bit reversed, but that’s just a sign of the times.

Q Have you ever bought something from auction?

A I’ve bought things at auction and sold millions of dollars’ worth of art and real estate at auction that I personally own.

Q You often serve as the auctioneer during these auctions. Do you ever get tongue-tied?

A No. We all go to auction school.

“Tommy Atatamus took two T’s and tied them atop of two tall trees!”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d02870385d311fa761f745389117f078

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: Ronald Dickerman

May 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Dickerman, 47, is the founder and president of Madison International Realty, a real estate private equity firm, which through its investment funds holds ownership stakes in buildings around the world, including several in the New York area, among them the Chrysler East Building and 520 Madison Avenue. The company has also had investments in the Seagram Building over the years.

Q Tell me about your business.

A I think we do something very unusual in the world of commercial real estate and investing: we acquire ownership interests in Class A assets from existing investors looking for an early exit strategy. Our objective is not to seek control of the properties — it’s to provide liquidity, which means buy their interest. We’re not a loan-to-own shop.

Q What do you mean by an “early exit strategy”?

A A sale. Usually these are finite holding periods — it may be 5, 10, 15 years — for the overall venture. When you look at all the properties down Park Avenue, for example, even though the name plates in the lobby may say “RFR Realty” or “Brookfield” or “Tishman Speyer,” they don’t own 100 percent of the equity. They have partners. And partners change their minds, have different investment objectives, and they need liquidity at different points of time.

Q What is the liquidity you provide typically used for?

A To redeploy into other investment opportunities, to fund other liabilities within their portfolio.

Q What percentage of your portfolio is in the New York area?

A A large percent — I would say about 35 to 40 percent.

Q How large is your stake, on average?

A I would say 25 to 49 percent.

Q How do you and your investors profit from these arrangements?

A We would be entitled to our pro-rata share of the revenue and cash distributions. But the big payday is selling the buildings sometime in the future.

We have a contractual right to trigger a sale of the portfolio after seven or eight years of joint ownership, or they buy back our interest at appraised value.

Q What kinds of returns are your fund investors seeing?

A Our overall return profile is between 17 and 18 percent gross; that’s an annualized rate of return for realized investments.

Q Do you also help to add value to your holdings?

A We invest in core Class A assets where the building itself is relatively stable and the deal is not distressed. What’s distressed about the transaction is the fatigue of the underlying investor.

We do, however, make value-creation recommendations to our sponsor. For example, we have a building on the East Side in a joint venture with RFR Realty, called Eastbridge Landing. It’s a Class A doorman apartment building, and we made recommendations about new lobby amenities like a concierge service, and new paint and carpet in the elevators and the lobbies.

Q How is business lately?

A I’ve never been busier in terms of our transaction pipeline. Just in the last three to six months we’ve seen a significant increase in the amount of partial stakes that investors are bringing to the market.

Q You recently announced a deal to acquire a 49 percent interest in 15 retail and entertainment properties owned by Forest City Ratner.

A They came to us, I think, in September 2010 to fund their go-forward investments. You may know that the Atlantic Yards development is something like $4 billion.

These properties are as core as core can be. They’re 99 percent occupied; the average lease term is over eight years.

Q You recently raised your stake in Chrysler East. Why?

A To about 48 percent from about 35 percent. That’s a joint venture with Tishman Speyer.

We actually invested through a secondary acquisition from existing investors. That property is a joint venture between Tishman Speyer and a German syndication of individual investors. There was a significant number of German investors who wanted to sell their interest.

Q Can you talk about any other deals you might be working on?

A We have a lot of interesting deals going on between the U.S., London and Paris.

Q Your family once owned a business in the Boston area, rehabbing and selling buildings.

A That’s true! I was involved when I was younger in the maintenance crew, cleaning hallways and pools. It was a terrific foundation for the real estate business.

Q So are you still a Red Sox fan?

A I have become a Yankee fan.

It was hard to be a Red Sox fan when I was growing up.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=38691552ef3859a96058d6968ea4f0cf

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,