The Real Deal

11/26/2025

A group of New York landlords is accusing the state’s housing regulator of unlawfully moving the goalposts on one of the few remaining paths to deregulating rent-stabilized apartments.

Balanced Housing Solutions — a coalition led by political consultant Hank Sheinkopf and represented by attorney Jim Walden — filed suit against the Division of Homes and Community Renewal, arguing the agency is retroactively enforcing substantial rehabilitation rules that changed in November 2023, the Daily News reported. Substantial rehabs, long used by owners to deregulate deeply distressed buildings, require replacing at least 75 percent of a property’s systems and proving the structure was “substandard or seriously deteriorated.”

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11/26/2025

Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison just paid $30 million for Palm Beach safari park, adding 254 acres of lions, rhinos and giraffes to a portfolio that already includes a resort, megamansions and most of a Hawaiian island.

Watch the video as we break down Ellison’s latest acquisition.
Then dive into the full story: https://bit.ly/44Ahz0C

11/26/2025

Miami Dade College is taking a second swing at approving a controversial land transfer for Donald Trump’s proposed $950 million presidential library and tower complex, after a lawsuit halted the deal and accused the school of cutting corners on transparency.

The board of trustees will hold a newly noticed public meeting and revote Dec. 2 on conveying a nearly 3-acre parcel at 500–540 Biscayne Boulevard to the state, the Miami Herald reported. The do-over follows a temporary injunction issued by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Mavel Ruiz, who blocked the transfer in response to a complaint filed by historian and civic activist Marvin Dunn.

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11/26/2025

Naftali Group has stitched together one of Miami Worldcenter’s biggest construction stacks to date, locking in nearly $500 million for its JEM Private Residences tower as C-PACE financing becomes a go-to tool for large-scale builds.

The developer closed $235 million in C-PACE financing from Nuveen Green Capital and $230 million in traditional construction loans from BHI, the U.S. arm of Bank Hapoalim, according to a press release. The combined $465 million is expected to retire a $35 million predevelopment loan BHI originated last year. Nuveen said its C-PACE portion — marketed as low-cost, long-term capital aimed at energy-efficient design — is the largest such deal in Florida to date.

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11/26/2025

Francis Ford Coppola is leaning on one of his most treasured assets — and one of San Francisco’s most recognizable landmarks — to stay afloat after the financial blowback from Megalopolis.

The director’s company, Francis Ford Coppola Presents, has taken out a new private loan and pledged the historic Sentinel Building as collateral, according to documents filed with the city assessor-recorder. The lender, Capital Holdings VI LLC, would become the building’s landlord if Coppola defaults. Neither side responded to requests for comment, and the loan amount wasn’t disclosed.

It’s a familiar pattern for the filmmaker, who bought the patina-green flatiron tower in North Beach for $500,000 in 1973, a year after The Godfather vaulted him into the cinematic pantheon. The seven-story building houses Café Zoetrope at street level and the longtime offices of Coppola’s American Zoetrope upstairs. He’s leveraged it before: in the 1980s, he nearly lost the building after falling behind on a $1.7 million loan; in 1998, he used it again to secure a $1.5 million loan from First Republic Bank.

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11/26/2025

Union Square’s retail chessboard moved again as Suitsupply grabbed a long-distressed Geary Street property, continuing a trend of tenants becoming owners in San Francisco’s battered shopping district.

The Dutch menswear retailer bought the first two floors of the Grace Building at 166 Geary Street at a foreclosure auction for $19.6 million, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The 12,907-square-foot retail parcel — fronting Geary and stretching to Suitsupply’s 5,000-square-foot storefront on Maiden Lane — had been in receivership since 2022.

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11/26/2025

After selling Rockstar Energy to PepsiCo in a multibillion-dollar deal, founder Russell Weiner — now going by Russell Savage — has turned South Florida into his personal investment playground, assembling one of the region’s flashiest residential portfolios and telegraphing a long-term bet on the Sunshine State.

Savage began testing the waters with two North Palm Beach flips in 2020. He bought the pair from Elin Nordegren for $32.9 million, then sold them 35 days later to Vista Equity’s Robert F. Smith for $48.2 million — a 47 percent gain that hinted at his appetite for speed and scale. Forbes pegs his net worth at roughly $5.4 billion, and he’s funneled a chunk of that into increasingly ambitious residential plays.

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11/25/2025

Amazon is preparing one of the biggest single-user data center pushes ever attempted, directing $50 billion toward AI-heavy cloud infrastructure built specifically for the U.S. government, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move cements the company’s role as Washington’s go-to hyperscale provider and marks a new frontier in Big Tech’s already feverish land grab for power, acreage and grid access.

The investment will deliver roughly 1.3 gigawatts of new capacity — enough to let federal agencies run their own AI models and manage vastly larger data loads. Customers will also gain access to AWS and Nvidia hardware, positioning government users to leverage the same high-performance systems powering the private sector’s AI boom.

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11/25/2025

Brooklyn’s high-end market didn’t wait for the holiday lull. Luxury buyers rushed to ink deals ahead of Thanksgiving, pushing the borough past $100 million in contract volume for only the second time this year.

Buyers signed 30 contracts between Nov. 17 and Nov. 23 — 18 condos, one co-op and 11 townhouses — totaling $101 million in asking volume, according to Compass’ weekly report tracking homes priced at $2 million and up. The only stronger week came in early October, when 35 contracts hit $108 million. The latest tally extends a post-election surprise: instead of the predicted retreat following Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win, affluent buyers have piled back in. Homes last week went into contract with no average discount. The median asking price hit $2.9 million and days on market averaged 80.

See all the contracts and deals in the comment section below.

11/25/2025

Westbank Projects is facing a courtroom fight with a former insider who says the firm promised him the top job — and a hefty payout — then backed away when its finances tightened.

Ian Duke, a longtime consultant, alleges Westbank founder Ian Gillespie tapped him to become CEO in early 2024, Bloomberg reported. The promotion, Duke says, was formalized in an amendment to his consulting agreement effective that June, with a CA$750,000 bonus tied to the transition and a plan to shift him from contractor to employee by 2025.

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11/25/2025

Nate Bargatze wants his own "Nateland." Travis Kelce is betting on Six Flags. Dolly Parton’s Dollywood empire is quietly swallowing more parks. Celebrities aren’t just launching brands anymore, they’re buying entire experiences.

Hit play to see who’s reshaping the theme park business, and keep reading here so you don’t miss the next big ride: https://bit.ly/43PBYyD

11/25/2025

U.S. commercial property prices posted their strongest annual gain since the pre-rate-hike era, a rare bright spot in a market still sorting through stalled deal flow and patchy fundamentals.

The RCA CPPI National All-Property Index climbed 4.2 percent year over year in October, its fastest pace since 2022, according to the latest report. Prices also ticked up 0.8 percent from September, marking a second straight monthly bump as sentiment improved alongside slightly better financing conditions. But the momentum comes with an asterisk: a recent government shutdown limited economic data, adding uncertainty that helped push deal volume down 22 percent compared to October 2024.

Office assets — the industry’s poster child for distress — led the gains. The sector logged a 6.5 percent annual price increase and a 0.8 percent monthly uptick, outpacing industrial, retail and multifamily. Both CBD and suburban offices posted similar year-over-year growth, at 4.6 percent and 4.2 percent.

See the full report here:

https://bit.ly/4pBQmmx

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