Last year was a good year for the Manhattan hotel market and, according to CBRE Group Inc.’s Winter 2012 Snapshot, this year will bring more of the same: solid performance and rising investment sales volume.

Looking to “unlock the value of the company” for shareholders, American Realty Capital Trust Inc., the flagship REIT of a New York investment firm, began trading Thursday on the NASDAQ Global Select Market as a publicly traded, triple-net-lease REIT.

BGC Partners Inc., an intermediary firm to global financial markets, has just purchased “substantially all assets” of troubled commercial real estate services firm Grubb & Ellis Inc.

Real estate fund manager Hudson Realty Capital L.L.C. and RXR Realty, a private real estate company, have joined forces to create a commercial real estate lending platform focused on the New York Tri-State market.

With the severe budget cuts, and in many cases outright downsizing, hitting all levels of government, are government tenants as desirable to office building managers and owners as they were pre–Great Recession?

Construction lenders raised concerns about the possibility of future overbuilding in key multi-family markets at the MBA CREF 2012 conference, which opened Monday in Atlanta.

Approximately eight months after Trammell Crow and Principal Real Estate Investors snapped up the former Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Houston, the joint venture has secured a commitment from Noble Energy Inc. to occupy the 497,000-square-foot office building in its entirety.

The reports on multi-family’s continued surge keep coming in, and the latest comes from Marcus & Millichap: While 2011 was a great year for the apartment sector, that momentum will likely continue in 2012 — contingent on the health of the larger economy.

BRE DDR Retail Holdings L.L.C., a joint venture between Blackstone Real Estate Partners VII L.P. and DDR Corp., has just spent $1.4 billion on a 47-property retail portfolio formerly owned by EPN Group.

Grubb & Ellis has finalized the transfer of the dealer and advisory agreements of its REIT — formerly the Grubb & Ellis Healthcare REIT II — to a co-sponsorship between American Healthcare Investors and Griffin Capital.