Rechler responds: RXR boss on health of his office portfolio

Scott Rechler is in damage control mode. A Financial Times article Thursday headlined “New York property tycoon to give worn-out offices back to the bank” rippled through the real estate industry. If the mighty RXR is facing a reckoning with lenders, readers thought, what hope is there for everyone else? As The Real Deal and other outlets picked up the news, Rechler sprung into action, working the phones to clarify that the “worn-out offices” were

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Mynd over matter: Startup founder on cracking the single-family rental sector

“Do you have to live in Atlanta to invest in Coca-Cola?” Doug Brien is making a point about how provincial single-family rental investing is, with people tending to buy within driving distance of where they live. That’s because the market, unlike those for stocks and bonds, is messy and opaque. Things we take for granted in debt and equities — reliable data, smooth portfolio management — are hard to come by in single-family rentals. Brien

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Watch: Lendlease COO on the next generation of megaprojects

Want a clue as to how the world’s skylines could change in the future? Look at the auto industry. “If you go back into the seventies, all cars were metal-based. Now they’re all carbon fiber,” said Denis Hickey, COO of Lendlease, the Australian-based development and construction behemoth that’s making a big push in New York. “Once you bring in a higher level of predictability and design engineering, can you bring in new materials for structure,

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Can the world’s most famous skyline also be the most forward-thinking on climate?

If asked to think about Bill de Blasio and climate change, your first thought might very well be the infamous convoy of SUVs that brought him from Gracie Mansion to the Park Slope YMCA every morning. Poor optics aside, the former mayor’s climate policies, particularly when it came to New York City’s built environment, were among the most ambitious and innovative in the country, according to Ben Furnas, who served as his climate czar. “I’d

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Tall, green and handsome: Lendlease’s COO on building sustainably at scale

There’s an iconic scene in “The West Wing” where Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet urges an acolyte to “see the whole board,” to understand all the stakeholders and implications in a given situation simultaneously. It’s a geopolitical masterclass, conducted over a chess game.   Few builders can take that approach to development, as it requires scale, capital, a global presence and influence over construction and the supply chain. Lendlease is one of them. The Australian company,

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Watch: What happens when fintech blurs into proptech?

Ryan Simonetti divides real estate into four key buckets: design and development, service and operations, sales and marketing, and finance. The key to shaking up all of them at once, he believes, is applying fintech. “There is a massive opportunity for fintech-oriented solutions to enable a lot of the movement of money and payments across that entire value chain across every asset class,” Simonetti, the founder of flex-space operator Convene and an active proptech angel

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Exit interview: New York’s climate chief on reshaping the city

Whether it’s a creative deal financing structure or a nine-figure apartment sale, if it happens in New York City real estate, the world’s markets pay attention — and take inspiration. The city’s climate czar believes the same could be true of sustainability. “If New York City’s buildings can be a model for climate-friendly real estate development, that’s a model that people are hungry for,” said Ben Furnas, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate

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Inside the rental tech ecosystem, with RET Ventures’ Chris Yip

In proptech, the early bird doesn’t always get the worm. It can take a lot of time to overcome owners’ reluctance to bet on a new product, and those long sales cycles have been the undoing of many a startup, according to Christopher Yip. “Historically, there’s not been a first-mover advantage because the worst thing you want to do is deploy a new technology in your portfolio and have the startup fail,” said Yip, a

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Convene’s Ryan Simonetti on CRE turf wars, space as a branded service and the proptech-fintech opportunity

For landlords, a new office lease once promised a decade of predictable cash flows. It made everything neat. Office buildings were easy to understand and value, boring in a way that made them easy to invest in. But this ain’t General Motors — what’s good for the owner of a space isn’t necessarily what’s good for the occupier.  “The average life cycle of a business today in the U.S., birth to death, is under seven

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WATCH: SmartRent’s Lucas Haldeman on multifamily’s tech era

The residential real estate sector is becoming more institutionalized, with greater consolidation of ownership among the largest players as Wall Street spurs a number of novel business models such as iBuying. But institutionalization and wider adoption of technology go hand-in-hand, according to Lucas Haldeman. “You can’t make this an institutional asset class without embracing smart technology,” Haldeman said in an interview with The Real Deal‘s Hiten Samtani. “The costs are too high. You can’t solve

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