Brooklyn office plan gets forward push

Bloomberg

Two New York City Council committees approved a zoning change that would clear the way for what developers say will be the first primarily office project to be built in Brooklyn in more than a generation.
Toby Moskovits’s 25 Kent Ave. won approval from the New York City Council Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises as well as the Committee on Land Use, with the full council scheduled to vote on the project on Thursday. The council generally follows its committees’ guidance.
The 480,000-square-foot (45,000 -square-meter) office and light-industrial development, to be built on a site near the Williamsburg waterfront, is expected to tap into demand from creative and technology companies that have proliferated in northern Brooklyn in recent years. Moskovits’s Heritage Equity Partners is co-developing the building with Rubenstein Partners, a Philadelphia-based real estate investment firm.
The project will be “Brooklyn’s first truly mixed-use building for manufacturing, creative and tech-based sectors,” Moskovits said in an e-mailed statement. “The building will soon move from vision to reality.”

Brookfield raises largest $14bn infrastructure fund
Brookfield Asset Management Inc. raised $14 billion for its latest infrastructure fund, topping its target, as Canada’s largest alternative asset manager goes on the prowl for larger acquisitions.
The pool, known as Brookfield Infrastructure Fund III, will be the largest private infrastructure fund ever raised in the industry, according to a statement from Brookfield. Its original target was $10 billion.
It took the Toronto-based firm nine months to raise the money, according to Sam Pollock, the head of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, the company’s publicly traded infrastructure arm.
That’s a month longer than it took its predecessor, which closed in 2013, to amass $7 billion, despite the new fund being twice as big.
“I realize that it probably seems large to the outside world,” Pollock said in a recent phone interview.

“But given the amount of deal flow that we’ve seen and the fact that the transactions are larger, it’s actually the perfect size for us.”
The firm committed $4 billion of its own money to Brookfield Infrastructure Fund III, according to the statement.
Brookfield Asset Management rose 1.3 percent to $34.58 in New York Tuesday at noon. Brookfield Infrastructure Partners rose 0.7 percent to $46.54.
Brookfield’s fund may not be the largest for long. Global Infrastructure Partners LP is seeking as much as $15 billion for its third flagship fund, people familiar with the matter said in November.