Law Would Permanently Nix Lender-Broker Mix
Jan 31, 2007, By Elaine Misonzhnik
Lawmakers in Washington are once again pushing a bill that would permanently bar banks from breaking into the real estate brokerage and property management businesses....
Gap: Deal or No Deal?
Jan 25, 2007
The ouster of CEO Paul Pressler at Gap Inc. earlier this week, after another lackluster holiday shopping season, has sparked new speculation among industry observers and analysts about whether the company will be the next retailer to fall in the private equity takeover wave. ...
Mills Reached Deal as Debt Deadline Loomed
Jan 18, 2007, Matt Hudgins
Mills Corp.'s decision to accept a $7.5 billion buyout offer from Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management Inc., including cash and assumption of debt, came as a March 31 deadline to pay pack a $1.06 billion mortgage loan from lenders represented by Goldman Sachs Mortgage Co.was creeping closer...
Mills Lands a Buyer
Jan 17, 2007
Embattled Mills Corp. today entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Canadian-based office owner Brookfield Asset Management Inc...
RioCan Jilts Ramco-Gershenson
Jan 17, 2007
Canadian REIT RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust’s abrupt termination last week of its proposed joint venture with Ramco-Gershenson Properties Trust has left the American REIT’s president and CEO Dennis Gershenson feeling scorned. ...
CMBS Business Booming, But Investors Are Wary of Retail
Jan 10, 2007
Investors, servicers, sponsors and other professionals involved in securitizing real estate debt are pinching themselves over the success their industry has enjoyed the past couple of years...
2007 Forecasts More of the Same
Jan 3, 2007
The 2006 holiday sales numbers, which posted the weakest growth in four years last week, are a sign of what’s ahead for the United States’ retail market in 2007 ...
Retailers Look to Gift Cards, Post-Christmas Sales to Save the Season
Dec 28, 2006
The holiday shopping season limped across the finish line last week. When the final numbers are tallied, it looks like retailers will rack up about a 2.75 percent gain in same-store sales—far off the 3 to 7.5 percent many experts predicted ...
Housing Bubble Taking Toll on Home Improvement Chains
Dec 20, 2006, Riccardo A. Davis
The aisles at home improvement giants Home Depot and Lowe’s are featuring a lot of items you probably wouldn’t expect. This year, they’re stocking shelves with plasma televisions, digital cameras, and even Christmas CDs...
Canada's Mega-REIT Has Funds, Will Travel
Dec 13, 2006
RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, the largest Canadian REIT, is joining the move by Canadian investors into the U.S. market. The Toronto-based company is launching a $1.5 billion joint venture with Ramco-Gershenson Properties Trust...
Atlantic Yards So Close, Yet So Far
Dec 13, 2006
Forest City Ratner’s controversial 22-acre Atlantic Yards mixed-use project in the heart of downtown Brooklyn cleared another hurdle last week. On Dec. 8, the Empire State Development Corporation, New York’s economic development agency, approved the general project plan and the use of eminent domain for the complex...
Defining Mixed-Use
Dec 6, 2006
In the past few years, as the idea of mixed-use development has gained cachet among investors, developers have thrown around the term pretty loosely. To counter that, a panel of experts at the New York ICSC Dealmaking show this week, tried to once again invest the term with a precise meaning. ...
Vornado Takes Manhattan (Mall)
Nov 29, 2006
Vornado is making a big bet on the Herald Square area as Manhattan Mall gives it another piece in a swath of properties it controls along Manhattan’s 33rd Street corridor from 9th Avenue to 6th Avenue...
What Equity Office Means for Retail REITs
Nov 22, 2006, By Elaine Misonzhnik
As private equity firms have been gobbling up office and residential REITs over the past two years, the conventional wisdom in the shopping center industry has been that retail REITs were too complex for even the most gung-ho buyout investors. And, with retail REIT shares trading at or near their highs (mostly), there seemed few opportunities for the private-equity players to snap up assets on the cheap, restructure and flip, their preferred modus operandi. ...
Mixed forecast for holiday shopping season
Nov 15, 2006
The turkey dinners are being planned, Macy’s is getting ready to deploy a giant Pikachu for its 80th Thanksgiving Day parade, and America’s shoppers are plotting their strategies for the grueling ritual of Black Friday. All the pieces are falling into place for a traditional Thanksgiving weekend. But among the oracles of retail—the analysts and consultants who have their own annual Thanksgiving rite, involving bold predictions of how the crucial holiday season will go—all is not well. This, it turns out, is a tough one to call. ...
