New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was among the dignitaries on hand Tuesday in New York’s Diamond District for the official launch of the 34-story International Gem Tower.Located at 50 W. 47 St. between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the tower, a project of Extell Development Co., is slated for completion in mid 2011 and [...]

No one ever promised that the road to economic recovery would be a smooth one, but even those of us who were prepared to navigate hills, curves and steep valleys are finding the beginning stages of economic stabilization more tiresome than we had imagined. We continue to battle a greater amount of negative indicators than [...]

Plenty of investors are preparing to benefit from the coming wave of distressed asset sales, but net lease investors are not unanimously enthusiastic about the prospects. As net lease investors weigh whether to adopt an opportunistic approach, some veteran players are sticking to longtime conservative strategies. In that debate, AEI Capital Corp., a 39-year-old firm [...]

As part of the government’s efforts to relieve the pressure cooker that is the American housing market, the U.S. Department of the Treasury will inject more than $330 million into affordable housing development in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Puerto Rico.The Treasury funding will be doled out under the American Recovery and Investment Act, which [...]

The special-purpose entity structure that has helped to power real estate finance in recent years remains intact after recent court decisions tied to the General Growth Properties Inc. Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. However, the rulings may turn out to be less than a total victory for bondholders in the long run. In a research note [...]

It was a grim quarter for the industrial real estate market. The first three months of 2009 saw the sector’s average vacancy rate climb up to 9 percent from 8.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 7.2 percent one year ago, marking a four-year high. That is just some of the discouraging news [...]

Various tax holidays got under way over the Memorial Day weekend, or will get under way shortly, possibly giving a nudge to retail sales in some places. In Texas, for example, Memorial Day weekend was the second annual Energy Star sales tax holiday, with certain Energy Star rated appliances qualifying for tax-free status, such as [...]

A bright spot to kick off the Memorial Day holiday weekend, or economic fool’s gold? Time will tell, but in any case the Conference Board reported on Thursday that leading indicators of the U.S. economy posted their first rise since the summer of last year. The organization’s index of leading indicators, which is designed to [...]

It’s certainly no secret that the global investment market has been severely hampered by the economic downturn. In markets across the world, both sales velocity and pricing are way down from the halcyon days of just a couple of years ago. All of this makes the $263 million sale of a Vancouver office tower all [...]

Call it the “Great Green Way.” Following on the heels of Manhattan’s iconic Empire State Building going green, Broadway is getting its first green theater. Built to green standards, Henry Miller’s Theatre has received a temporary certificate of occupancy. The 1,055-seat house is located in the new 55-story Bank of America Tower, at One Bryant [...]