Newmark Grubb Knight Frank Global Corporate Services has landed an exclusive deal with MoneyGram International and is expanding its reach and expertise with more than a dozen new hires in recent weeks, many of them employees of the former Grubb & Ellis.

The appointment of the 10-year Cresa veteran and former Staubach Co. president is the latest in a series of major moves.

Cole Real Estate Investments executive vice president Tom Roberts offers a leading owner/investor’s perspective on strategy and market trends.

The U.S. homeownership rate dropped 60 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of 2012, while rental property vacancy fell to its lowest level in a decade. And Spain has officially entered the recession.

Could Grubb & Ellis 2.0 be shaping up under the American Realty Capital umbrella?

Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. now has a new weapon in its arsenal: its new PortfolioCommand offering, to be launched today.

Last week’s announcement that the Federal Trade Commission had approved CoStar Group’s acquisition of LoopNet Inc. brings to fruition—almost a year to the day later—a much-noted transaction that also contains the seeds of further change not far down the road.

Overall growth for the U.S. economy was middling during the first quarter, with expansion coming in at a 2.2 percent annualized rate, while the National Multi Housing Council reported last week in its Quarterly Survey of Apartment Market Conditions that things are still improving for the apartment industry. U.S. consumer sentiment was up a bit in April, to the highest level in a year.

Start spreading the news. Avison Young is now a part of it — New York, that is. Canada’s largest independently owned commercial real estate services company has made its debut in the Big Apple with the opening of a new office on Park Avenue.

In an annual REIT conference sponsored by New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, Sam Zell and William Mack offered several hundred real estate professionals and NYU students their views on leverage, consolidation and the industry’s uneven recovery.