Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

With all but one of the 278 units (which include a super's apartment) finally sold , the developers of 550 Vanderbilt (B11), the only condo building so far in the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project, are putting Penthouse East back up for sale. The price: $4,995,000, for 7 rooms, including 3 beds and 3.5 baths. The StreetEasy listing indicates that it had been listed 10/2/19 for $5,000,000, then taken off the market less than six months later. So that tiny price change is just for marketing. However, as I wrote last December when citing the sales of the first of the three penthouses, this unit was initially marketed for $5,805,000. So that's a significant cut in the sticker price. The unit was built by Greenland Forest City Partners, with Greenland USA having a 70% share in the building. Later, after the joint venture built three towers, Greenland bought out all but 5% of Forest City's interest in the project going forward. A huge tax break Notice that monthly taxes...

So Ryan Serhant, the "Million-Dollar Listing" broker who took over sales at the 550 Vanderbilt condo and participated in an episode that misportrayed his role , last month announced he'd form his own real-estate firm. At least to the Real Deal, "Serhant maintained that he is not leaving Nest Seekers International" and will continue to work on existing projects there, presumably including 550 Vanderbilt, to which that firm is still attached. But the publication quoted "two insiders" who said Serhant and the brokerage "have been unwinding their relationship since at least the start of the year," and several team members have left. And some of his projects at Nest Seekers no longer have his name attached. A follow-up 10/21/20 Real Deal article, Inside Ryan Serhant’s new brokerage , suggests that most superstars actually prefer to be part of a larger firm, given the support they offer. Meanwhile, Serhant may be building "the future of the i...

I have an article in The Bridge today about the curious reality TV show, Million Dollar Listing New York, and the portrayal of how agent Ryan Serhant supposedly got the 550 Vanderbilt listing: The article is headlined  Million Dollar Charade? Behind a Reality TV Show in Brooklyn . Here's an excerpt: The show’s narrative suggests that Serhant made a Hail Mary pitch to win the job as exclusive broker for the luxury condo project at 550 Vanderbilt Ave . Over lunch at nearby Morgan’s Brooklyn Barbecue with an executive from the building’s development company, he unspools a plan to invite hundreds of prospective agents and buyers to a grand smorgasbord from restaurants all around the building, based on the idea that he’s selling a neighborhood (Prospect Heights/Clinton Hill), not just the luxury condos....  The record, however, suggests that any such drama was long past. Serhant already had the job. A look at the reality behind the reality show, based on the building’s documen...

From Bloomberg, 6/27/18,  Investors Are Piling In to NYC Condos at a Record Pace : At a new luxury-condo building in Brooklyn, one buyer told broker Ryan Serhant that she’d like three apartments -- one for herself to live in, and two as investments to rent out. She wasn’t the only one. The tower, 550 Vanderbilt, had more buyers become landlords in 2017 than any other condo project in the city, according to data from listings website StreetEasy. For New York as a whole, a record 10.7 percent of all condos that sold last year were listed by their owners as rentals within months. ...At 550 Vanderbilt, the first condo tower to open at the 22-acre (8.9-hectare) Pacific Park project near the Barclays Center arena, 41 percent of the units sold last year were listed as rentals within 180 days of closing. That's a pretty big number. Part of that has to do not with investors seeking return but investors--especially the earliest round at 550 Vanderbilt--from China seeking a safe place to...

New Parks Sprout Around New York , declares the New York Times Real Estate section, in a front-page article just posted, and, while not ignoring criticism of the Pacific Park open space, inevitably gets things wrong and fails to tease out distinctions between fractional space like the latter and public open space delivered in full, earlier in the development. Writes C.J. Hughes: New parks are coming to life across the city, many courtesy of new apartment complexes, which, in addition to the usual extras, are offering swaths of switch grass and swamp oaks, waterfalls and fountains, benches and boulder-lined paths. And although these nods to nature are created by developers and are on the grounds of condo and rental buildings, you won’t need to have a pricey apartment there to enjoy them. In a change from the residents-only courtyards of the past, these open spaces are truly open and, despite their private roots, can be used freely by the public. Get ready for the self-serving quot...

The Real Deal 5/22/18 published  How to conduct a new development “takeover” , hailing super-broker Ryan Serhant of Nest Seekers International and his team's ability to get 550 Vanderbilt, the only condo building in Pacific Park (formerly Atlantic Yards), from 65 percent to 80 percent sold. The article suggests that the Nest Seekers team's secret sauce, after taking over from Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, might have been organizing "a community smorgasbord" with vendors from nearby restaurants and relying on, as the reality TV show star put it, "pure hard work and mass exposure.” This omits two major factors. The first tranche of units at 550 Vanderbilt went to buyers in China, who signed on even before the official launch, thanks to Shanghai-based Greenland's connections there, as noted in Real Deal coverage . Many of them are presumably less price sensitive than domestic buyers, as they want a piece of real estate in New York and also to get th...

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...

Would you believe that Real Estate Weekly, in a 1/12/18 encomium, Top New York apartment buildings that stand out in the crowd , included 550 Vanderbilt under the category "Best Bonus (A Public Park)." Now, it's not the "the first building to open at Pacific Park Brooklyn"--that was the arena, and then 461 Dean. But check out the broker-speak from agent Ryan Serhant: “This is the first chance to own in a building inside of a park. How often do you get the chance to do that in New York? It’s a great deal for people who don’t want to look back and say, I wish I did that.” Sure looks like a park in the rendering below, from the architects behind the planned 550 Clinton . 550 Vanderbilt--at 202 feet and counting--is at the southeast edge of the project site. (And won't there be a little noise and dust?) Remember, publicly accessible open space is not a public park.

So, according to the Pacific Park Brooklyn Twitter account, "#550Vanderbilt is booming, all thanks to the brilliant @ryanserhant." First, not sure how much it's booming, since sales are surfacing slowly in public records. But any uptick in sales wouldn't have anything to with a stealth price cut thanks to 421-a maneuvering, would it? #550Vanderbilt is booming, all thanks to the brilliant @ryanserhant . pic.twitter.com/5vNmOO9IsA — Pacific Park BK (@pacificparkbk) December 27, 2017 And a screenshot

The 12/20/17 Buzzfeed article by Lisa Riordan Seville,  They Lost Their Homes. Now A Reality TV Star Is Selling Them. , is subtitled, "Behind the scenes of Million Dollar Listing New York are black and Latino families who lost their homes in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis." (It was written with the support of an investigative reporting grant by the Urban Reporting Program of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.) It's a sad and sobering story of sketchy--if not necessarily illegal--behavior by real estate investors and the tone-deaf (and willfully oblivious) performance of Ryan Serhant, a star of the reality TV show Million Dollar Listing New York , who opened a Nest Seekers International office in Bedford-Stuyvesant to sell houses from there and adjacent Bushwick. From the article: What Million Dollar Listing’s viewers did not learn, and what Serhant told BuzzFeed News he did not know, is that before the fresh paint and white Carrara marble, these ...