There is a new big player in New York's real estate market, Bloomberg reports.
Purchasing Manhattan's biggest apartment complex and stakes in a group of office properties with one being the Starrett-Lehigh building on the Hudson River, Blackstone Group LJ was New York's biggest spender in real estate acquisitions in 2015.
According to Real Capital Analytics Inc., Blackstone dropped a total of $9.6 billion buying properties in New York's metropolitan area and selling $4.2 billion worth mostly in the area of Manhattan. Those figures don't include the Waldorf Astoria hotel deal worth $1.95 billion to which Blackstone owned majority of the stocks at the time of the transaction. The real estate firm, based in New York, made up 21 of the rest of Manhattan's commercial-property transactions last year.
Blackstone had its eyes set on New York - U.S.'s largest and priciest real estate market - all along, being the biggest private equity real estate investor in the world. Real Capital records show that Blackstone didn't make the cut in 2014's top 10 real estate buyers in New York, but the company is all set in keeping an active pace this year, said Ken Caplan, chief investment officer of the company's real estate unit.
"Market volatility will certainly have an impact, but disruptions often present opportunities for those who have capital available to invest," he said in an e-mail.
The company had a field day last year, with its multi-billion deals of multiple properties and several partnerships. Partnering with Canada's Ivanhoe Cambridge, Blackstone purchased the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village apartment complex for about $5.3 billion and purchasing 5o percent of the stakes in RXR Realty in a$4-billion deal of office properties. Among other purchases were a minority stake in the Helmsley Building at 230 Park Ave which is valued at $1.2 billion., and a shopping mall and garage in the Sky View Parc complex in New York's Queens borough. Blackstone also took over Strategic Hotel & Resorst Inc. and closed a $330-million hotel deal for JW Marriott Essex House.
Meanwhile, the company also went into a selling spree last year, based on the data by Real Capital. Blackstone raked in $2.2 billion for its disposal of an office building at 1095 Avenue of the Americas, $516 million for New York Times' former headquarter in an office-condo building, $382 million from the leasehold on the London NYC hotel in midtown Manhattan and office building at 717 Fifth Ave. Blackstone's Avenue of the Americas deal was the biggest single U.S. office sale since 2008.