One year after sbe, a hospitality and real estate development company, and Stockbridge Capital Group L.L.C. shut the doors of the Sahara Hotel & Casino to assess new options for the iconic gaming destination, the partners have obtained $300 million in financing for a redevelopment project that will transform the Sahara into SLS Las Vegas.

CMBS loss rates may have just reached a high point and be ready to turn around, according to Fitch Ratings’ annual Loss Study.

Location and strong sponsorship helped win the confidence of financiers for the properties in Detroit and suburban Chicago.

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.

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.

In an intricate, multi-faceted transaction valued at $100 million, Kane Realty has sold a segment of its Park & Market mixed-use residential property in the North Hills district of Raleigh, N.C., and recapitalized another.

SL Green, which has been extremely busy in the Times Square submarket of Manhattan during the past year, has just notched another record: The signing of what the firm calls Manhattan’s largest office lease, which keeps media giant Viacom in the 1515 Broadway building through 2031.

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.

Where is the growth in an age of uncertainty? Some of the industry’s most influential leaders wrestled with that timely question Thursday at the annual REIT conference organized by New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

Christian Redfearn, director of the graduate programs in real estate at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, blogs on CPE’s From the Inside about the abuse of IRR in measuring property value.