Yet another outfit is positioning itself to take advantage of what is expected to be a deluge of distressed property assets in 2009.

K&L Gates, the corporate law firm recently named by the National Law Journal the nation’s 10th largest, with more than 1,700 attorneys worldwide, including 100 in New York, is forming a group that will, in what is becoming all too familiar language, focus on “the restructuring of distressed real estate loans and the positioning of foreclosed assets for successful sale.”

“I think everyone is forming a distressed-asset group at this point,” said Dan Fasulo of Real Capital Analytics.  read more »

The Belgian Nico De Swert, the prodigal arranger of flowers, will open a flower school and flower shop at 81 Front Street in Dumbo.

Mr. De Swert is, in the arcane world of flower arrangement, a rare orchid. He has appeared in countless magazines, published a book called Living With Flowers and, in perhaps his crowning achievement to date, has his own line of flower arrangements in partnership with 1-800-Flowers.

Mr. De Swert has made his nut in flower sculptures—like his bursting melons made from red Berlin roses and lemon leaves, and his gorgeous arrangements, like the $950 “bleached Salix, pink Ranunculus, blue Muscari, and white Zantedeschia” bouquet featured in New York magazine last year.  read more »

Brace yourself. We have some pitiful numbers for you.

So far this quarter—and the quarter ends on New Year’s Eve—only two Manhattan building transactions worth more than $90 million have occurred. Count them. Just takes two fingers. 

No. 1: 1372 Broadway, which sold to Lloyd Goldman in October for $274 million. No. 2: 95 Morton Street, which private-equity firm Brickman picked up last week in a pre-Thanksgiving deal for $96.5 million.

It’s probably worth pointing out that 1372 only got done because the seller, Wachovia Bank, financed it.

According to Real Capital Analytics, Manhattan has seen only nine “office” space transactions of more than $2.  read more »

We’ve got a steaming mugful of good news for New York landlords and coffee junkies (and some bad news for Starbucks haters): The Seattle coffee concern is still expanding in New York City, economic maelstrom be damned.

“There are still opportunities to be profitable here, which is great news,” said Dan Lewis, Starbucks’ group marketing manager in the Northeast Atlantic region, who, in keeping with the firm’s crunchy image, had just “inhaled” a veggie burger before chatting with us.

Mr. Lewis wouldn’t say where Starbucks is looking to expand, or how many new city stores it’s planning to open, but one of our favorite retail brokers tells us that, following a couple of quiet months, Starbucks is once again busy touring potential locations.  read more »

In the wonderful imaginations of wild-haired, politically active college sophomores everywhere, the chief executive officers of multinational corporations meet in volcanic caverns lit by candelabra, drink good port, snicker about the foolish masses and sell one another their 24th-floor Manhattan condos with handshakes.

In reality, CEO-to-CEO deals really do happen, even during horrendous economic slumps, though volcanic caverns are not involved. According to city records, the much-celebrated Xerox chief Anne M. Mulcahy sold her apartment at the Grand Beekman on East 51st Street last month to Rober Pelzer, the new chief of Novartis Corp., the North American entity of the gigantic Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Novartis.  read more »

On July 16, Loews Corporation co-chairman Jonathan Tisch, whose father and uncle founded the multibillion-dollar conglomerate, paid a record $48 million for a co-op at the legendarily tyrannical 2 East 67th Street.

Loews’ share price hit $44.13 that summer day, and the Dow was over 11,308.

At the end of this Monday, Loews’ stock closed at $23.48, and the Dow was around 8,149.

But surely the economic downturn doesn’t matter to people at such a high-gated co-op; what matters is that the most recent sale at 2 East 67th (a building so overconfident that its natural Fifth Avenue address is shrugged off) was $48 million, which theoretically means all the neighboring spreads, even the ones on lower floors, could and should fetch something similar, downturns be damned.  read more »

The only real estate investor who flips vintage local properties outfitted with, say, reflecting ponds and bamboo walls, but who also flips massive thickets of self-storage spaces, and has been called “dreamy” by Gawker, is Adam Gordon. “I told my wife that before we were married,” he said this week about the blog’s compliment. “It may have closed the deal.”

They met when he opposed her application for a restaurant on Bond Street: “She got a much a better location, which turned out to be Double Crown,” the new colonialism-inspired eatery on the Bowery that just got two stars from Frank Bruni.  read more »

By the time 2008 ends, there will be two kinds of high-end brokers left in New York. Most will outwardly panic, and the sturdier will force their dread to simmer beneath a slightly clenched smile that says, “Everything is quite fine, thank you.” After all, a tiny (and dwindling) group of only wealthy people are willing to make real estate deals, at least the kind of big real estate deal that New York prides itself on.

In the past few weeks, The Observer has written about the children of a Texas natural-gas billionaire, a Gulf & Western co-founder, a Berkshire Hathaway billionaire and a Turkish billionaire all buying up Manhattan real estate.  read more »

Do you feel burdened with an empty storefront? Are you convinced you’re the only landlord saddled with too much debt? Do you feel terrified that the bottom of this infernal market will never come? Are you anxious? Depressed? Lonely?

Call your broker.

The plunging market has turned commercial real estate brokers—those hard-nosed, pinstriped wheeler-dealers who play by few rules but their own—into purveyors of comfort and wisdom. It’s an activity that brokers, being brokers, have archly dubbed “hand-holding.”

“The landlords, the owners, the developers, whether they have one building or millions of square feet, they are in need of constant hand-holding and assurances,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail leasing and sales division at Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

Gradually, the letters have begun to accumulate in Robert Tierney’s Lower Manhattan office. They all implore the same thing: landmark status for the Rainbow Room in 30 Rockefeller Center.

The first letter to Mr. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, came in September from Peter Ward, president of the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, a union with Rainbow Room employees that has strong connections to elected officials. Then came a letter from Richard Parsons, the Time Warner chairman, who wrote there was “no more romantic space than the Rainbow Room” in New York. Then the Historic Districts Council sent a letter of approval; a similar letter from the Municipal Art Society is forthcoming; and on Tuesday night, Manhattan’s Community Board 5 was expected to take up the issue.  read more »