Last week was a good one for Ken Griffin.
The billionaire money manager who — along with Vornado Realty Trust and Rudin — is in the midst of one of New York City’s most ambitious developments at 350 Park Avenue, scored a cool $3.3 billion in construction financing for the planned 66-story behemoth.
That’s a pretty good sign for any market.
And, wait, there was another multibillion-dollar deal, you say?
On any other week we probably would have led with the fact that UDR, the multifamily real estate investment trust, is partnering with Apollo Global Management for a $2 billion joint venture consisting of 19 multifamily communities spanning 7,059 units, which UDR will manage, and which Apollo is investing some $1.34 billion worth of equity into.
Both of these would indicate a market that was humming along and we had nothing to worry about.
To quote the great John Belushi, but nooooo….
Which is not to say that things are bad, but after coming off some record-setting months — and despite the aforementioned multibillion-dollar deals — there were also signs that the market has floated back to Earth, at least somewhat.
In looking at investment sales in Manhattan, for example, last quarter the numbers dropped (checks notes)… 27 percent??
That seems bad. But perhaps not quite as bad as it could be.
“We’ll have our record year this year, even through all of this,” Brandon Polakoff of Avison Young told Commercial Observer, citing the fact that Manhattan was still on pace to surpass 2025. And, while the borough saw fewer sales than during the previous quarter (87), the dollar volume was 4 percent higher than this time last year.
Moreover, the office market has generally been so good that some landlords have been hoarding empty footprints to offer great big blocks of space in a market with a lot of scarcity for a big, well-heeled tenant. Lease sweeteners have been bouncing up and down since COVID, but are largely in eclipse from their peak in 2024. Investors are making plays for well-located properties. (Tishman Speyer certainly believes the office market is good. Together with Bouwinvest Real Estate Investors, they just created a joint fund to purchase top-tier offices around the country, and they started out with the Chrysler Building.)
And this one-step-forward/one-step-back scenario was playing out on last week’s third-quarter earnings calls, which are starting to gear up. The beast of the industry — Blackstone — reported that profits dipped slightly more than 9 percent. (Not only that, but Blackstone saw its $1.3 billion CMBS loan for multifamily in the Sun Belt and Seattle region just go into special servicing.)
“The third quarter of 2026 represented a highly complex environment characterized by a historic increase in bond yields globally, including U.S. Treasury yields hitting the highest level in decades,” said Stephen Schwarzman on the call. “A higher cost of capital has negatively impacted investor settlement and transaction activity and triggered significant volatility in the markets.”
That being said, it wasn’t the same story everywhere. CBRE did not have a bad quarter (even though its stock dipped after the call). Net income grew 22 percent to $443 million for the quarter (it was $363 million in the third quarter of 2025), and revenue was up 13 percent year-over-year.
Oh, and CBRE purchased the London-based data center equipment company Onnec Group for $610 million.
The only problem for CBRE was a slight drop in leasing — which was also true for SL Green Realty, but SL Green made up for it with two lucrative sales: 10 East 53rd Street to Jeffrey Kaplan’s Meadow Partners for $312.2 million, and 110 Greene Street to Natora Group for $226 million.
“Higher rates impact all real estate businesses and most every industry, and we’re talking about a swing of about 150 basis points throughout the year, up from the already elevated levels at the beginning of the year,” SL Green CEO Marc Holliday noted. “That, of course, is not something we control, and we’ve noted in the earnings release that it had a 25-cent impact on the back half of the year. However, we can and have aggressively and smartly hedged parts of our liabilities to lock in lower interest rates, so the impact has not been nearly as great as it could have been.”
Keep Calm and Go to Florida
You know where no real estate professional seems to doubt themselves? South Florida.
At least that was the mood at CO’s South Florida Capital & Development Forum on Oct. 15 at Don Peebles’ Bath Club in Miami Beach.
“We’re selling unaffordable apartments!” announced Dezer Development’s Gil Dezer, whose latest ultra-luxe condo is fittingly called the Bentley.
“There’s a new billionaire minted in San Francisco every week,” agreed Nahla Capital’s Genghis Hadi, who’s currently building the Raleigh, “and they want to be in Miami.”
And luxury condos are hardly the whole story — the deals keep coming from all directions: Stephen Ross’s Related Ross plunking down $64 million for the two-building, 380,823-square-foot office complex North 40 in Boca Raton; Grover Corlew ponying up $69.7 million for 200 East Broward in Downtown Fort Lauderdale; Genting Americas securing half a billion dollars in refinancing for the Omni Center near Downtown Miami.
But, on this day of rest, if your thoughts stray back north, you can spend today reading about some of the titans of Midtown Manhattan.
To mark the 100th anniversary of Williams Equities, CO sat down with Michael T. Cohen, Robert Getreu and Andrew Roos to get the history of the family-owned firm. (Or, families.)
We also chatted with Rudin’s head of leasing, Craig Panzirer, about how he scored one of the best seats in the office business.
Oh, and stand by for our data centers issue coming up — but, in the meantime, here’s a little taste about a guy who might just have one of the newest and coolest innovations in the field.
See you next week!
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