Month: January 2020

David Doctorow and Rupert Murdoch David Doctorow, a senior executive at eBay, will be the new CEO of Move Inc., the News Corp. subsidiary that operates Realtor.com. Effective Feb. 3, Doctorow will take the helm from and report to Tracey Fellows, who is News. Corp’s president of global digital real estate. “David is a thoughtful,…

Sunflower Labs founders Alex Pachikov and Christian Eheim (Credit: Wikipedia, Pixabay) The latest in home security looks a lot like your garden. Two new products — sensors dubbed Sunflowers and an aerial drone called The Bee — were launched this week at the CES conference in Las Vegas. They are the brainchild of San Francisco-based…

Lennar’s Stuart Miller and a Lennar home (Credit: Lennar and iStock) Despite past indicators of a housing market slowdown, Lennar Corp. reported an uptick in fourth-quarter sales, as it pushes to sell lower-priced homes. The Miami-based homebuilder’s new home orders jumped 23 percent, year-over-year, in the latest quarter, to 13,089 homes. Home deliveries rose 16…

Buyer of $94M “Billionaire” mansion in Bel Air takes out $58M mortgage (Credit: iStock) The mystery buyer of Bruce Makowsky’s over-the-top spec mansion “Billionaire” has taken out a $58 million mortgage on the property, city records show. That jumbo loan is equal to about 62 percent of the $94 million purchase price. Coincidentally, the home…

Roofstock CEO Gary Beasley (Credit: Roofstock, iStock) Roofstock, an online marketplace for buying and selling single-family rental homes, just raised $50 million to go after a bigger piece of the fast-growing market. The round, led by SVB Capital, brings Roofstock’s total equity raised to $133 million, according to TechCrunch. Other participants in the round included…

From left: Steven Spinola, Veronica Hackett and Joseph Beninati (Illustrations by Paul Kisselev) Real estate is a famously fickle industry. Today’s good investment can become tomorrow’s cautionary tale in the blink of an eye, and a career in the business is rarely a straightforward climb up the corporate ladder. Kent Swig of Terra Holdings went…

Michelle Pfeiffer, Jim Crane and the Pacific Palisades home. (Credit: Getty Images and Zillow) Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are proven luxury real estate buyers and sellers in Los Angeles, but Michelle Pfeiffer and David E. Kelley may be catching up. Most recently, the Hollywood actress and her TV producer husband sold a Pacific…

As crowdfunding startups rethink their business model, many are becoming more like traditional real estate investment firms (Credit: iStock) Starting in 2012, a wave of crowdfunding startups sought to take advantage of new regulations to revolutionize real-estate investment in the same way that Airbnb and Amazon have upended hospitality and retail. But things didn’t work…

Beth Styne (Credit: Nick Reid and Wikipedia) UPDATED, 5:29 p.m., Jan. 7: A week into the new year and already there are major changes afoot at Coldwell Banker. Beth Styne is stepping down as regional vice president of its Greater Los Angeles division, 11 months after she left her post as the division’s chief operating…

Owen Thomas (Photo by Axel Dupeux) Owen Thomas has served as CEO of Boston Properties since April 2013, when the firm’s famed co-founder Mort Zuckerman tapped him as his successor. Thomas was seen as a surprise pick for the role, as he came to the real estate investment trust from the world of finance —…