Real Estate Daily News Buzz October 28, 2015

Reserve-White-house-domeReal Estate Daily News Buzz is designed to give news snippets to readers that our (yet to be award winning) editors thought you could use to start your day. They come from various business perspectives, real estate, government, the Fed, local news, and the stock markets to save you time. Here you will find the headlines and what the news buzz of the day will be.

Tuesday, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 41.62 points, or 0.2%, to 17,581.43. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 5.29 points, or 0.3%, to 2,065.89. The NASDAQ composite fell 4.56 points, or 0.1%, to 5,030.15.

Benchmark U.S. crude fell 78 cents, nearly 2%, closing at $43.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, which is used to price international oils used in many U.S. refineries, fell 73 cents to $46.81 a barrel in London.

Wholesale gasoline fell by a fraction of a cent to close at $1.287 a gallon in New York, heating oil fell 2 cents to $1.424 a gallon and natural gas edged up 3 cents to $2.092 per 1,000 cubic feet

Morgan Stanley Makes a Comeback in Real Estate “Morgan Stanley wrapped up fundraising over the summer for its first higher-risk real-estate fund since 2007, a sign that it has finally recovered from the downturn. The new global fund has attracted $1.7 billion in commitments from investors such as CIC and Australia’s sovereign-wealth fund, according to people familiar with the matter.” (Wall Street Journal)

Crowdfunding of U.S. Real Estate Deals Gains Momentum “A tipping point may be near for U.S. investors seeking to benefit from crowdfunding in real estate, an industry that is a clear winner in the early stages of raising capital for small businesses over the Internet. The amount of money raised, size of deals and the speed at which they occur – at times in a matter of hours – has steadily increased, suggesting crowdfunding for real estate is maturing.” (Reuters)

Mack-Cali Hires Brokers to Sell its Sole Property in the City “Mack-Cali has tapped a broker to market its office condo at 25 Broad St.—its only property in New York City. The New Jersey-based real estate investment trust, which owns several office and residential buildings along the Jersey City waterfront, has hired Eastdil Secured to sell its interest in 125 Broad St. Crain’s first reported last month that Mack-Cali would put it on the market.” (Crain’s New York Business)

Avoiding Federal Tax Liability When Selling Commercial Real Estate “Like-kind exchanges provide a powerful tool for commercial real estate investors and owners. A 1031 like-kind exchange allows investors to sell appreciated property and reinvest the proceeds in the purchase of qualifying property with no immediate capital gain. While investors may have made a profit on each exchange, they continue to avoid any tax liability until cash is ultimately realized upon the sale of a property.” (Crain’s Cleveland Business)

PeerStreet Brings Real Estate Investing to Main Street “Skip the savings account or CD, and put your money where the pros do. In real estate. That’s the premise behind PeerStreet, an E-Trade for real estate, where instead of betting on stocks and ETFs, investors are building a portfolio of real estate backed securities. The 22-month-old startup, based in Manhattan Beach, launches to the public on Monday and aims to democratize access to investments previously only available to a privileged few.” (The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Target to Open Two Smaller-Format Stores in L.A. “Target Corp. is opening two smaller-format stores in Los Angeles, part of an expansion in urban markets across the country. In recent years, the Minneapolis retailer and other big-box companies have expanded their offerings in urban locations, in an effort to serve city dwellers who previously had to drive to the suburbs in search of the firms’ bargains. By year’s end, Target plans to have opened nine urban-focused stores, compared with six traditional, big box locations.” (Los Angeles Times)

Top Real Estate Developer Talks About Shaping NYC Skyline “MaryAnne Gilmartin is one of the most powerful women in real estate in the country. Born in Queens and married to a retired New York City police detective, she’s brokered the deals that have brought about The New York Times skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano, as well as the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which was the first new indoor major sports and entertainment arena in New York City since 1968.” (Here & Now)

Is $5.4B Sale Sam Zell’s Way of Saying the Party’s Over? “In 2007, Sam Zell struck a deal to sell his entire office-building portfolio to the Blackstone Group for $39 billion, then the biggest leveraged-buyout deal ever. By the end of the following year, the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent the real estate market on a tailspin. The deal earned Zell the reputation of being unusually good at predicting market swings. And it means observers tense up every time one of his companies makes a big sale.” (The Real Deal)

Industry City to Get $320M From Bank of China and SL Green “Bank of China and SL Green Realty Corp. are lining up a $320 million loan to recapitalize existing debt on the massive redevelopment project, which boasts 6 million square feet of commercial space across 16 buildings, according to a person with intimate knowledge of the deal. The loan is slated to close in the next few weeks, that person said on the condition of anonymity.” (Commercial Observer)

Herald Square Properties’ Gerald Nocera on Revitalizing NYC’s Iconic Lipstick Building “You’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of leaving things better than you found them than Herald Square Properties. Since launching in 2009, co-founders Gerard Nocera and Michael Reid have either owned or provided asset management services for over 1.9M SF of office space in Manhattan. This includes efforts to put the Lipstick Building back on the map through a comprehensive series of renovations, infrastructure upgrades and strategic rebranding.” (Bisnow)

Walgreens confirms it will buy Rite Aid for $9.41 billion — Walgreens confirmed Tuesday that it will buy rival pharmacy chain Rite Aid for about $9.41 billion in cash. Walgreens says it will pay $9 per share for Camp Hill, Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid Corp. That’s a premium of 48 per cent to the closing price of Rite Aid Monday. The deal is worth $17.2 billion when debt is included, the companies said. Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., based in Deerfield, Illinois, is the largest U.S. drugstore chain, based on store counts. Rite Aid is the third largest. The deal expected to close in the second half of next year. (ABC News)

US home values and rents defying global slowdown — U.S. housing appears to be insulated so far from the cooling global economy.Home values and rental prices are steadily rising, fueled by strong demand and a tight supply, a pair of reports Tuesday showed. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index climbed 5.1% in the 12 months that ended in August. And in September, median rents nationwide rose a seasonally adjusted 3.7% from a year ago, according to real estate data firm Zillow. (ABC News)

How Comcast wants to meter the Internet — Most home Internet service providers offer unlimited data, but cable giant Comcast is moving in the opposite direction. It’s started charging heavy Internet users extra in more parts of the country. The reason? A small but growing number of consumers are skipping cable subscriptions and doing their TV-watching over the Internet instead. So finding a way to charge for heavier Internet use could bolster Comcast’s revenue as the ranks of its cable customers shrink.

REI bucks Black Friday shopping, will close stores that day — Outdoor retailer Recreational Equipment Inc., known as REI, has announced it will buck Black Friday and close its 143 stores on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The Kent-based co-op told members the plan in an email Monday, saying instead of working they’ll pay their employees on Nov. 27 to be outside. REI also created the social media hashtag #optoutside and a website where people can share their outdoorsy plans for that day

US consumer confidence slips in October — Americans turned slightly more anxious about the job market this month. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell to 97.6 in October, down from a nine-month high of 102.6 in September. Fewer people surveyed for the business research group described jobs as “plentiful” compared to September, with that measure slipping to 22.2% from 24.8%. The decline likely reflects the results of two consecutive jobs reports. Employers added just 142,000 jobs in September and 136,000 jobs in August, after routinely chalking up monthly net jobs gains in excess of 200,000.