LAST year’s three most ingenious brokers and deals were finally revealed last night by the Real Estate Board of New York at its annual cocktail party at the 101 Club.
All are first-time winners.
Paul Glickman and Mitchell Konsker of Cushman & Wakefield took home the first place Henry Hart Rice Award for “Pioneering a New Frontier” by leasing Ogilvy & Mather 560,000 square feet in 636 Eleventh Ave., which was redeveloped for the ad agency by The Hakimian Organization.
Office brokers Glickman and Konsker convinced the Hakimians to kill a planned residential conversion and redevelop 636 Eleventh — a former chocolate factory and failed telecom hotel — into an office building. The lease was one of last year’s largest deals.
Ironically, the lease happened because the ad agency’s current space at Worldwide Plaza got too pricey. That space is still available and the building is in the midst of a restructuring by lenders due to the Macklowe family owners getting financially overextended after they bought the Equity Office Properties portfolio.
Darcy Stacom and her CB Richard Ellis partner Bill Shanahan also owe their second-place win, which REBNY calls the Robert T. Lawrence Award, to the Macklowes.
Their winning entry, the “Sale of the GM/Legacy Portfolio — Honoring the Family Name,” consisted of the sale of a portfolio of Macklowe assets, including the GM Building at 767 Fifth Avenue, 540 Madison Avenue, 125 West 55th Street and 2 Grand Central Tower.
All were properties the Macklowes had to sell when they took on too much debt and pledged personal assets while buying the Equity Office portfolio from The Blackstone Group.
The Macklowes have since lost those properties and others.
Stacom and Shanahan were working with Billy Macklowe under extreme pressure and time constraints to unlock every dollar they could just as the capital markets collapsed.
Mortgage broker Shawn Rosenthal led The Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group team to win the third-place Edward S. Gordon Award for putting together a $700 million financing for the $680 million purchase of 650 Madison Avenue by Ashkenazy Acquisitions.
Being able to close the deal just as the lending environment was grinding to a halt led them to separately negotiate tranches of debt and equity through a syndicate that included joint-venture partners Carlyle Group, a $325 million mortgage from the French bank Natixis Real Estate Capital, a “mezzanine” loan sold to San Francisco-based Shorenstein and funds from Wachovia.
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Mary Ann Tighe, CB Richard Ellis’ tri-state chairman and herself a six-time REBNY Deal of the Year winner, took home the Woman of the Year award at the Realty Foundation luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria yesterday.
Working the phones and her Microsoft Outlook, Tighe reeled in major donors to subsidize the entire luncheon and bring in a record total of about $420,000.
Foundation Chairman Jerry Cohen of Tishman Speyer told us the owners’ group this year alone has been helping brokers with grants of $5,000 to $25,000 — sometimes multiple times.
Those needing the aid have included those who’ve been donors in the past, Madoff victims and stock market losers.
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Sources tell us that Forest City has decided to pick up some cash of its own by selling the master lease for the 274,000-foot Harlem Center — a Class A office and retail complex located at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue that is likely to bring in over $100 million.
Forest City has hired the Cushman & Wakefield capital markets team of Jon Caplan, Scott Latham, Richard Baxter and Ron Cohen to handle the task.
The retail is almost fully leased by Marshall’s, H&M, CVS and Staples, while the 147,000-foot office component is fully leased primarily by state agencies.
The New York State Urban Development Corp., now the Empire State Development Corp., owns the land.
