Search results

New York didn’t invent the apartment. Shopkeepers in ancient Rome lived above the store, Chinese clans crowded into multistory circular tulou, and sixteenth-century Yemenites lived in the mud-brick skyscrapers of Shibam. But New York re-invented the apartment many times over, developing the airborne slice of real estate into a symbol of exquisite urbanity. Sure, we […]

Two of Wall Street’s savviest value investors, Bruce Berkowitz and David Einhorn, pride themselves on their rigorous analysis. Now they’re locked in a scorched-earth dispute over the value of some Florida real estate. How could they look at the same facts and reach such wildly different conclusions, and what does that say about the “value” […]

In the 1990s, some of the trailers at Paradise Cove went for as little as $25,000, while trailers with an ocean view sold for up to $400,000. But in the housing boom of 2006, prices went up tenfold, much more than in the rest of Malibu, even though buying a trailer is a pretty sketchy […]

Tom Barrack, a billionaire investor who made his fortune in real estate, has discovered a market in distressed celebrities. With Neverland Ranch and Miramax under his belt, he’s now on a shopping spree—and bringing along his buddy Rob Lowe.

You might think that Mikhail Prokhorov would have had a not-so-soft case of buyer’s remorse this past spring. A month before the start of the National Basketball Association season, the 45-year-old Russian billionaire struck a deal to buy the New Jersey Nets from the real estate developer Bruce C. Ratner. When the league owners finally […]

As summer begins, what better way to measure Wall Street’s health than a real-estate tour of the Hamptons? For every mansion on the sales or rental market, there’s a story—sometimes involving Bernie Madoff—and brokers are shell-shocked. The author surveys the deals, no-deals, lawsuits, divorces, and teardowns that characterize this strange, dark season.

As we navigate this speculator’s paradise turned financial wasteland, Mr. Joseph stands at the front of the bus in a green polo shirt, highlighting specimens like this one: a white stucco house fronted by palm trees and topped by a Spanish tile roof on a canal emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. It last sold […]

To the degree that it’s possible for a 102-story building to take a city by surprise, One World Trade Center snuck up on the New York skyline. For years the project, conceived in the throes of tragedy, has been debated, negotiated, renamed, redrawn, hailed as a beacon, and maligned as a boondoggle. It wasn’t until […]

The imbroglio over the ground-zero mosque, like all New York stories, is about the clashing dreams of ordinary folks — and, of course, real estate. #Sept11