Month: October 2020

Bruce Flatt, Arjun Menda and Chennai (Brookfield, RMZ Corp, iStock) Brookfield Asset Management is set to close the biggest real estate deal in India’s history. The firm will pay RMZ Corp. $2 billion for a 12.5 million-square-foot office portfolio, according to Bloomberg. It includes properties in the southern cities of Bengaluru and Chennai. RMZ said…

Joe Biden (Credit: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images) The owner of a Colorado mobile home park allegedly told tenants their rent would likely double if Joe Biden is elected president. Residents of Fort Morgan shared the letter with local NBC affiliate KUSA questioning its legality, with some calling it an act of voter suppression. The Colorado Secretary…

An aerial view of a pop-up drive-in theater built in the parking lot at the Broadway Commons in Hicksville, New York (Getty) While many traditional streams of income for landlords have slowed or dried up due to the pandemic, one has proven to be a surprising earner: parking lots. Landlords of large parking lots and…

French buyers are flocking to London for home purchases. In the first nine months of the year, 11 percent of overseas buyers in prime London neighborhoods were from France, Bloomberg News reported. Last year, French nationals made up just 2 percent of overseas buyers. The shift comes in part as the pandemic has complicated travel,…

Opendoor CEO Kevin Wu, Daniel Morillo and Ken Griffin (Getty; Opendoor; LinkedIn) As it prepares to go public, Opendoor is bringing on a new hire from Citadel, Ken Griffin’s $32 billion hedge fund. Daniel Morillo will join the company as chief investment officer, leading Opendoor’s pricing and data science teams, the company said in a…

WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani (Wikipedia Commons; iStock) WeWork’s credit rating, already rated as junk, has been downgraded on concerns that the pandemic could seriously weaken demand for office space. Ratings agency Fitch dropped WeWork’s long-term issuer default rating Thursday one notch from CCC+ to CCC. Both scales are non-investment grades, otherwise known as junk or…

The coronavirus pandemic pushed back the home shopping season into the fall, according to a Zillow report. (iStock) Fall is usually a cool-down period for the U.S. housing market. Not this year. Homes sold nearly twice as fast in September as they did in the same month last year, and faster than in any month…

Bank OZK CEO George Gleason (Unsplash; Bank OZK) New York’s commercial real estate market has been pummeled by the pandemic, but one of its biggest condo construction lenders reported almost no write-downs in the third quarter. On its earnings call Friday, Arkansas-based Bank OZK reported that its net charge-off rate, or ratio of loans written-down…

The number of mortgage borrowers in Covid-19 forbearance plans ticked down again this week. (iStock) Nearly 3 million U.S. homeowners were in forbearance programs as of this week, a massive amount but still a sharp drop from 4.76 million at the height of the pandemic. That’s according to a new report from mortgage-data firm Black…

(Getty, iStock) UPDATED, Oct. 23, 2020, 5:15 p.m.: Many commercial mortgage-backed securities borrowers that are strapped for cash are trying to turn the keys over to their mezzanine lenders. That’s according to a recent report from data provider Trepp, which found that the borrowers behind about $3.9 billion in outstanding CMBS debt across nearly 100…