The self-immolating spectacle of Wall Street has cast a paralytic spell over Manhattan’s commercial brokerages. Buildings don’t trade. Leases don’t close. Real estate professionals take extended vacations. Only a few brokers have resisted the spell. They are this year’s power brokers.

The contingent of eight selected this year is by no means all inclusive. It is, however, representative. It includes three brokers who, at the start of 2008, were extraordinarily well placed to survive the storm and used their contacts and reputation to rise above the turmoil—Eastdil’s Doug Harmon, and CB Richard Ellis’ Paul Amrich and Richard Hodos. All three work at the top of the market and have continued to do so, the spectacular economic meltdown only mildly throwing them off their game.  read more »

For perhaps the first time, commercial brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield predicted unequivocably that Manhattan office rents would drop, in its just released second quarter investment sales report.

Among the report's sobering conclusions:

■ Year-over-year sales activity through 2Q08 down 59 percent at $13.8 billion

■ Foreign investors have replaced previous high leverage buyers

■ Manhattan vacancy increased 1 percent to 7.1 percent in the last quarter, yet rising rents reached a record high of $71.59 a square foot, up 21 percent from a year ago

■ As financial sector layoffs materialize, rents will decrease

■ Development pipeline limited due to a lack of construction financing

For the full report, see attached.

The commercial real estate market must really be wretched. How else to explain Cushman & Wakefield’s midyear breakfast on Tuesday morning when, in Michael’s glassed-in patio, a couple of ballsy brokers erupted with skepticism, calling into question their bosses’ own stats—to those bosses’ faces. In front of the press.

“If I were sitting in the media looking at the stats, I’d think that someone was drinking the Kool-Aid,” said Joshua Kuriloff, a broker at the firm.

Mr. Kuriloff even uttered the R-word (“recession”) to describe the economy—a term that’s verboten among most real estate types, who favor limper nouns like “contraction,” “slowdown” and “downturn.  read more »

Over $13.8 billion in Manhattan investment sales closed or went under contract in the first six months of 2008, a precipitous drop from the $34 billion in sales volume done in the first six months last year. Nearly half of this 2008 volume came via foreign investors.

The numbers come from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield's latest quarterly Manhattan market report, released this morning during a breakfast at Midtown power eatery Michael's.

The dismal investment sales numbers--which cover building, property and portfolio sales--aren't a surprise, really. Nor is the increase in the amount of foreign investment (it accounted for maybe 12 to 15 percent of investment sales in previous six-month periods).  read more »

Brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield will relocate its headquarters to an enormous new space on Sixth Avenue.

C&W, which calls itself the “largest privately held commercial real estate services firm,” signed a 15-year lease for a whopping 156,282 square feet, the entire seventh floor and portions of the eighth and ninth floors at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd streets. The 43-story Emery Roth & Sons-designed building is owned by Vornado Realty Trust.  read more »

Forget your modern (and soul-crushing) office space aesthetic. Who needs cubicles and florescent lighting, when you could have a working fireplace, a rooftop terrace, and views of Central Park?

If that’s your bag, and you’ve got $1.3 million in that bag to spare, have we got the space for you.  read more »

The real estate wonks at Cushman & Wakefield have said it, so it must be true: the market is contracting.

Egad(!) is right.

C&W's "First Quarter 2008 New York Capital Markets Group Manhattan Market Overview" makes the following sobering conclusions:  read more »

It's become a truism that Brooklyn commercial rents are a bargain when compared to Manhattan's. That truism is now, if you will, even truer.

A Cushman & Wakefield first-quarter survey of 82 commercial buildings in Brooklyn revealed that, between the first quarters of 2005 and 2008, the average rent per square foot in Brooklyn rose 14 percent to $31.44, while in Downtown Manhattan, the average rose an astronomical 62 percent to $50.28.

The difference between rents in the two markets was far less pronounced back in the halcyon days of 2005, when Brooklyn rents averaged $27.51 a foot, while Downtown Manhattan rents averaged $31.03.  read more »

It’s a balls-out move, but this Wednesday CB Richard Ellis will take on its archrival Cushman & Wakefield by hosting a first-quarter analysis luncheon for media folks the day after Cushman & Wakefield hosts its own first-quarter breakfast for the same media folks.

Call it a schmooze-fight.  read more »

Time to ready the oxygen tanks: Commercial brokers are planning to race up 86 floors of the Empire State Building.

Come Feb. 5, an Empire State Building spokeswoman tells us that the city’s biggest brokerages will square off with each other as part of the building’s annual “Run-Up,” with Jones Lang LaSalle, Cushman & Wakefield, CB Richard Ellis, Studley and Newmark Knight Frank each planning to send at least one team of five runners (team names include the “Sub-Primers” and “Victoria’s Secret”).  read more »