Pulse.
Notes from my desk.
Box Street Park is moving into construction. The City announced the $40M project on 2.5 acres of former MTA land along Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, with completion targeted for the end of summer 2028.
The park was promised with the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront rezoning more than twenty years ago. The development rights and the public space ran on different clocks.
For a waterfront acquisition, those are separate assumptions. The zoning tells you what can be built on the site. The park schedule tells you when the location gets the amenity in the pitch. A park that opens after lease-up contributes differently to the model from one already outside the front door.
Nostrand Houses closed a $607M rehabilitation financing on September 29, announced by the City today. It covers 1,148 apartments across 16 buildings in Sheepshead Bay and is the first project financed through the Public Housing Preservation Trust.
The conversion is in the funding. Section 8 support and a long-term ground lease to the Trust give the development access to a larger federal operating subsidy. The property stays public. NYCHA keeps managing it.
The apartments aren't changing use. The income supporting the capital structure is changing. More reliable operating support can expand the rehabilitation debt a property can sustain, which changes how much work can be financed against the same buildings.
That is the part worth following in preservation: how the funding structure translates into borrowing capacity, and how much building work that capacity actually buys.
GFP has been selected for 100 Gold Street. The proposal would replace City offices in Lower Manhattan with roughly 4,000 homes, including about 1,000 permanently affordable, rent-stabilized apartments, plus community facilities and public-realm improvements.
The City describes a cross-subsidy requiring no City funding, with project proceeds also supporting agency relocation. That puts the relocation bill inside the development economics. It is not an administrative footnote.
The market-rate program has to support more than its own construction. It has to help carry the affordable units and the cost of moving the current occupants. The public land also has an opportunity cost, even without a City cash contribution.
Public and environmental review are starting. Scoping is planned for October; ULURP is expected in 2027. The variables to follow are the approved program, the relocation cost, and the schedule. All three affect what the site can support.
Mequity and Flatiron Equities bought 152 West 36th Street for $23.8M in 2024. Now PGIM is providing $57M to refinance construction debt and finish an office-to-self-storage conversion. Commercial Observer reports roughly 1,500 storage units, eight additional stories, and completion targeted for early 2027.
The interesting part is the demand thesis. The sponsors are looking at future housing from the Midtown South rezoning and supplying somewhere for those households to put their things. They are underwriting residential growth without building apartments.
That is a different way to read the same neighborhood. The office building becomes a service for the housing around it rather than housing itself. The timing question is how quickly those households arrive relative to when the storage opens.
AWC announced EA Wellness Club at The Empire in Bangkok, with VitalLife advising on health and longevity. The proposed program combines wellness, dining, relaxation, and shared spaces around the clock.
The play is to add another demand window to an office address. After-work and weekend visits could put more of the property to use. Whether that becomes asset value depends on the income left after fit-out and operating costs.
Fairmont Bangkok Sukhumvit started its phased opening today. AWC and Fairmont describe a 416-room hotel with more than 2,000 sqm of event space. Dining and other components are coming online through the rest of 2026.
The handover schedule is now an operating assumption. Rooms can be earning while other venues are still being delivered. Staffing and operating costs do not necessarily wait for the last component to open.
For a phased hotel, the model needs more than one opening date. It needs the monthly cash flow between the first guests and the full program coming online, then the ramp to stabilization.
AWC plans to redevelop River Garden into an 18-story, 146-room Plaza Athénée hotel in Bangkok. The announced investment is about THB 2.9B, not a disclosed acquisition price. The program exceeds 20,000 sqm of gross floor area, with opening targeted for 2028.
The property sits within AWC's eleven-destination riverside network. The thesis looks less like a stand-alone hotel and more like another anchor in a connected waterfront portfolio.
Connections can help bring guests to the door. Room rate, occupancy, and redevelopment cost determine what those stays are worth. The underwriting question is how much the network contributes to the individual hotel's revenue relative to the cost of redeveloping the property.
Nomura and Sansiri announced their first strategic joint venture: The Monument Sathon, a 185-unit condominium on Sathon Soi 10. Sansiri puts it about 80 metres from BTS Saint Louis. Nomura specifies conventional parking for every unit.
Close to rail does not mean a car-light product. Parking is still part of the offer.
That is a capital-allocation choice. Space and construction cost go into parking rather than another part of the program. The useful question is what that combination does for pricing and absorption, not whether a transit address automatically makes parking redundant.
The Doe Fund and the City broke ground on Casanova Residence in Hunts Point: 96 supportive and affordable homes, with on-site services for formerly homeless New Yorkers.
The services belong in the operating model from day one. The building needs capital to get delivered. The housing model needs recurring funding to keep working.
For this kind of project, the service contracts deserve the same attention as the construction financing: who pays, what the commitment covers, and when it renews.
NYC's new LIFT Tracker maps more than 100 City-owned sites with potential for over 50,000 homes. The inventory includes previously announced projects still working through financing and other steps. The headline aggregates several stages of development.
One entry proposes 113 affordable apartments above a replacement Grand Concourse Library. The library remains part of the program; housing uses the capacity above it. The existing public use becomes part of the redevelopment rather than something to remove.
The useful way to read the map is by stage. A site awaiting a developer and a site awaiting a construction closing are different underwriting problems, even when both sit in the same housing count. Each needs its own next approval, capital requirement, and delivery schedule.
AWC announced MONA Bangkok and a planned cross-river cable car linking Asiatique with its mixed-use development on Charoen Nakhon Road. The cable car alone carries an announced investment of more than THB 2B.
The real estate play is to connect assets the sponsor controls. A river separates two sites. A crossing could let visitors use them as one destination, with the museum giving them another reason to come.
That capital is not buying conventional rentable floor area. Part of the investment thesis sits in the surrounding properties: more visitors, more spending, stronger leasing. The underwriting needs to separate the attractions' own revenue from the benefit to the rest of the estate. Otherwise it becomes difficult to tell which part of the development is earning the return.
Today is the first 467-m timing cutoff. A qualifying commercial-to-rental conversion in NYC commencing by June 30, 2026 falls into the 35-year benefit schedule. The next qualifying window, through June 30, 2028, gets 30 years.
The commencement trigger is the qualifying DOB alteration permit for work requiring a new certificate of occupancy. The acquisition closing does not start that clock.
That puts the permit schedule directly into the acquisition model. The same building can have a different tax profile depending on which side of the deadline it lands. Five years of benefit duration can change what a buyer can pay before a single apartment is built.
The affordable requirement stays in the model too: at least 25% of units, with permanent affordability restrictions and the other eligibility conditions. The tax benefit and the restricted income have to be underwritten together.
Dusit Central Park's June update puts its roughly seven-rai roof park at the center of the Bangkok mixed-use story, with the visual connection to Lumpini Park doing part of the work.
The landscape does not earn conventional rent. The hotel, residences, offices, and retail have to capture its value. The question is what premium they can support against the cost of building and maintaining the park.
Mayor Mamdani released "Block by Block," a housing plan targeting 500,000 new units over ten years. The framework is legible: mandatory inclusionary requirements raised to 25% affordable across the board, city-owned land prioritized for affordable-first development, and a push to expand the geography of where housing gets built.
The interesting part is the capital structure. "Affordable-first" on city land is a different underwriting problem than a private site with a cross-subsidy. The subsidy math has to close without the market-rate units doing the work. That means either deeper city subsidy, lower land cost (zero, in most cases), or some combination of federal tax credit equity and very patient debt. Which of those levers is actually in the plan matters more than the headline unit count.
Five hundred thousand units in ten years is about 50,000 per year. NYC has averaged closer to 25,000–30,000 in recent cycles. The gap between announcement and permitting is where unit projections go to die.
Mamdani is six months in. The political will exists. The entitlement pipeline and capital formation are the variables.
Bangkok released its first updated city plan since 2013. The revision organizes density around the transit network: higher FAR corridors along rail lines, three new CBD designations outside the historic core, and a reduction in floodway zone restrictions that had been blocking development in lower-lying districts.
Thirteen years between city plans is a long time. In that window, the BTS and MRT networks expanded materially, two election cycles turned over planning leadership, and the land market moved without the regulatory framework catching up. The plan being released now is already partially describing what the market has been doing informally.
The repricing dynamic is straightforward: sites that were assembled under the old envelope and have been waiting on a permit path now have one. The assemblage cost was underwritten against the old FAR. The new FAR is the upside. Whoever bought and held in the right corridors in 2018–2022 is looking at a different return profile than the one they underwrote.
The zoning didn't change what the city is. It confirmed what the market already knew.
Gary Barnett bought a Park Avenue development site for $500M. The site runs through the block with direct Park Avenue frontage. At that basis, you are paying for the address, the zoning envelope, and the brand platform, in roughly that order.
Barnett has done this before. The 1520 First Avenue medical office tower took six years of assemblage patience before a permit. Extell's model is to identify a product gap, acquire at a basis that others won't underwrite, and build into a market they helped define. It's not speculation. It's a very long-dated development thesis with construction risk priced in at entry.
$500M in basis on a single site is also a statement about where Park Avenue sits in the luxury development hierarchy. The address carries a rent premium that justifies the land cost, if the program is right and the timing holds. Both of those are real risks at this basis. But Barnett has earned the right to be taken seriously on both.
The question, as always: what's the exit cap rate, and what rent do you need to hit it?
RXR bought 47 Hall Street in Clinton Hill for $161M in 2016. Spent years shepherding it through a full ULURP. Got the rezoning: industrial to mixed-use, 650,000 SF of housing rights, MIH option one locked in. Then sold it to YS Developers for $121.4M. A $40M loss, minimum.
The rezoning was real. The entitlement was real. It just didn't transfer enough value back to the seller to cover the basis, the carry, and a decade of market drift.
This is what rezoning risk actually looks like. It's not just the probability that ULURP fails. It's the probability that ULURP succeeds at exactly the wrong moment, with a program, a cost structure, and a capital market that weren't there when you underwrote the entry.
The buyer gets a shovel-ready site with political cover and a cleared ULURP. The seller gets out of a position that hadn't worked in nine years. Both sides had a reason.
Extell filed permits for an 86-story, 1,198-foot tower at 80 West 67th Street. 430 units. Former ABC/Disney campus. Would be the tallest building on the Upper West Side by over 400 feet.
The neighborhood doesn't want it. Council Member Gale Brewer wants 30% affordable. Community Board 7 pushed for more. Actor Tony Danza led protests.
Barnett's position is simple: the zoning allows up to 1,500 feet as-of-right. No ULURP. No discretionary review. No obligation to negotiate. He's offering 20%, about 121 units, mostly senior studios. "If that's the starting point, I'm not sitting down," he said at CB7.
As-of-right zoning exists to remove political uncertainty from the development equation. It worked exactly as designed. The community's leverage here is essentially zero, which is the point.
Silverstein sold Extell the site for $931M. Extell controls the air rights on surrounding properties. They assembled with patience and are now building with the envelope the zoning gave them. That's the whole play.
Judged NAIOP NYC Metro's inaugural University Challenge. Seven grad programs, one 35,000 SF West Side infill site, mock investment committee.
The gap between the top teams and the rest wasn't design or market analysis. It was how early they resolved the zoning. Winners locked the legal envelope first, then built the program around what it could actually support. The others had a vision and tried to make the numbers fit after.
University at Buffalo took the grand prize. NYU Schack and Baruch split the runner-up. Good day.
KKP projects Bangkok housing prices rising 5-10% in 2026. At the same time, property transfers are forecast to fall to 290,000 units, the lowest in eight years. Both things are true simultaneously.
The mechanism: crude oil above $110-120/barrel pushes cement, concrete, and steel costs up. Construction cost for a standard 120-170 sqm house rises. Developers reprice new launches upward to protect margins. Buyers lose purchasing power as energy costs inflate everything else. Mortgage rates stay elevated or rise further. Transfer volumes fall.
Higher prices, fewer transactions. That's not a contradiction. That's a cost-push squeeze in the mass-market segment, the 2-5 million baht range that accounts for 54% of Bangkok sales by volume.
The suburban corridors with the largest unsold inventory, Rangsit-Pathum Thani, Bang Bua Thong, Bang Na, are going to sit. Developers who built at the old cost base are stuck between margin protection and absorption reality. KKP's advice to buyers who can qualify: lock in now, fixed rate, before the new cost base fully flows through to list prices.
The geopolitics are doing the work that demand never recovered enough to absorb.
Permits filed for a 32-story, 418-foot building at 30 West 37th Street. 95 units, mostly rental. Two stories become 32.
The building isn't the story. The zoning is.
First permit under the Midtown South Plan with the R12 FAR cap repealed. That block couldn't build tall for decades regardless of what the market wanted. The plan changed. The permits followed.
Density doesn't happen through rezoning headlines. It happens through the first permit that proves the new envelope works.
LPC unanimously approved a 285-foot residential tower at 144 St. Felix Street in Fort Greene, rising from the base of Hanson Place Central United Methodist Church. About 240 units, 60% affordable, with retail and a community facility integrated into the church structure. FXCollaborative and ADP Architects on design. Strekte is the developer.
The approval came after three months of revisions. The main ask from LPC's February meeting was height and massing in relation to One Hanson Place (the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower). The team came back with a 13-foot reduction and cleaner geometry that defers to the Savings Bank. That was enough.
The site context matters. It's a 16,447 SF corner lot in the BAM Historic District, zoned C6-4 (R10 equivalent) within the Special Downtown Brooklyn District. That zoning came out of Bryan Kelly's 2021 rezoning of 130 St. Felix, which upzoned the block from C6-1 (R7-2 equivalent, 4.0 FAR). The prior owner, Watermark Capital, bought it for $15M in 2024 at roughly $92/ZFA. Strekte later said at a community board meeting that they acquired all rights from Watermark, though the ACRIS record still shows the $15M deed to Watermark. Price of the transfer: unknown. The project did get a $25.3M refinance from Integritas Capital in November, which tells you something.
The congregation already relocated to Grace United Methodist in Park Slope. The building has been sitting vacant since 2019. LPC's argument was straightforward: the church is deteriorating, the congregation can't sustain it, and adaptive reuse with a tower is better than the alternative. Hard to argue with that on the merits.
The residents of One Hanson Place are unhappy. They wanted the western facade preserved and called the height reduction arbitrary. Their leverage at LPC is limited once the commission decides a project fits the historic district. It fits.
What's still ahead: alteration permits haven't been filed yet. The design approval is in hand. The entitlement clock is now running.
The Netherlands Embassy is selling its Ploenchit site and moving to Dusit Central Park in August. The sale price is probably large in absolute terms, but meaningless for a sovereign government. Maybe not the real reason.
Perhaps the real reason is zoning. Bangkok's land use code allows high-rise construction on parcels surrounding the embassy. Once towers go up on all sides, the compound fails basic security standards: sight lines, perimeter control, the works. You can't fix that with money. You move.
Bangkok once designated a diplomatic corridor from Wireless to Sathorn. Never enforced it through height controls or use restrictions. Land prices did the rest. The British Embassy sold and left around the same time. Maybe for the same reason.
CIM is converting the former Watchtower complex at Columbia Heights into 661 rentals, 25% affordable, with vertical additions on two of the five buildings. Morris Adjmi on design. ULURP still ahead.
The basis story here is interesting. JW sold to CIM, Kushner, and LIVWRK for $340M in 2019. The original plan was Panorama: retail and office. Kushner and LIVWRK pulled out in 2018 before that went anywhere. CIM has been holding a $340M waterfront assemblage in Brooklyn Heights for seven years while the program evolved around it.
This is not a 467-m conversion play. These are warehouse and office buildings getting vertical additions and a full ULURP. The entitlement is still being manufactured. The profit, if there is one, gets made when that ULURP closes.
The basis was set in a different market, under a different program, with different partners. Whatever pencils now has to work against all of that.
Thai real estate financing is over 70% debt. Green loans offer 0.10–0.50% rate reductions. Access clusters at large-scale commercial. Mid-size residential largely can't get in.
The bottleneck isn't size. It's reporting capability and ESG risk documentation. Developers who can speak the bank's language get cheaper capital. The ones who can't pay standard rate.
Capital structure is a design decision. So is how you document the building.
LPC formally installed markers for the Central Harlem–West 130th–132nd Streets Historic District. Designated 2018, 160+ late-19th-century row houses between Lenox and Seventh.
Landmark designation isn't a freeze. It's a filter. Additions still happen. Developments still get approved. LPC just makes you be deliberate about it.
What changes structurally: unused development rights become transferable air rights. The district is a sending site. City of Yes expanded the receiving radius. The rights were always there. More of the city can now absorb them.
Bangkok is overhauling its master plan around the transit network. Three new CBDs, reduced floodway zones, density following the rail lines.
The sites that get repriced first are the ones already assembled and waiting. Location didn't change. The plan did.
Rockefeller Group and Atlas Capital are acquiring the Church of Holy Name of Jesus on West 97th for $96M. The church stays. The school, convent, and rec buildings get redeveloped into mixed-income rental.
The deal structure is the story. Underutilized portions of the campus unlocked without displacing the primary use. Partial-site redevelopment done right.
Barnett assembled the site in 2018. Six years later, 1520 First Ave is the first ground-up medical office tower in Manhattan in decades. Asking $125/SF on tower floors.
The premium exists because it was purpose-built. Buildings retrofitted for medical use had to discount to fill. Build for the tenant from the ground up and you set the market.
Assemblage patience. Product clarity. That's the gap Extell found.
Bangkok's zoning isn't as rigid as it looks. Central's 761-rai Rangsit site just cleared rezoning after 13 years. Industrial to commercial, via Section 35 petition outside the standard 5-year cycle.
Acquire underutilized land/restrictive zoning. Identify the pathway. Execute.