It's, um, interesting to see the Instagram post below (screenshot + embedded) from star real estate broker Ryan Serhant of Nets Seekers International, who, while discussing Pacific Park's 550 Vanderbilt--specifically a conflict he once had with someone associated with the deal--declared that "honesty is the best policy.... Be brutally honest. Authentically honest." This is the broker, who, along with the developer, spuriously claimed that units at the building had $1 tax bills. He also claimed , after troubles with Bedford-Stuyvesant foreclosures he represented came to light, said "I was just a hired gun." It's worked out for him, it seems. Serhant, representing author Jonathan Safran Foer's effort to sell his Boerum Hill townhouse (Pacific Street, just west of Bond) for $8.995 million (cost: $5.4 million in 2014, first listed by another broker for $10.495 million), bought it himself for $7.6 million, according to the Real Deal. H...
This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, concerns the $6B project to build the Barclays Center arena & 15-16 towers at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park Brooklyn in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland USA bought a 70% stake going forward. In 2018, once the arena & four towers were built, Greenland bought out most of Forest City's stake, then sold three leases to other companies.