Real Estate

Bloomberg US-based Hill International has won two contracts to provide construction services on real estate and tourism development projects in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. In Saudi Arabia, Hill has been awarded a contract from the local DUR Hospitality to provide services during the construction of the Diplomatic Quarter Marriott Hotel in Riyadh. Hill says its two-year contact has an estimated ...

Bloomberg U.S. apartment vacancies climbed in the first quarter as a flood of newly built units hit the market, slowing the rate of rent increases. Effective rents, or what tenants pay after landlord concessions, rose 4.5 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, down from 5 percent growth at the end of 2015, Reis Inc. said. The vacancy ...

Bloomberg Norway will let its sovereign wealth fund raise real estate holdings by about $17 billion, while rejecting a proposal to expand into infrastructure projects. The upper limit on real estate investments for the $850 billion fund, the world’s biggest, should be raised to 7 percent from 5 percent, the Finance Ministry said on Tuesday. The real estate assets will ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia is taking an unprecedented hands-on role in housing finance and development as it seeks to re-energize a plan to build more than a million homes and make ownership more affordable. The Housing Ministry plans to create its own development company and start a mortgage-guarantee fund to encourage banks to increase lending, Minister Majed al-Hogail said in an ...

Bloomberg Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co. is joining U.K. developer Delancey Real Estate Asset Management Ltd. and Dutch pension fund APG Asset Management NV to create a $2 billion home-rental business in London, with properties in the former Olympic athletes’ village and the Elephant & Castle district. The venture, which is subject to regulatory approval, will manage 4,000 homes, ...

Bloomberg The battle for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. may be over, but the company’s chief executive officer says it’s just the beginning for lodging-industry mergers. “Clearly the Marriott-Starwood transaction has created a lot of chatter about further consolidation,” Starwood CEO Tom Mangas said on a conference call with analysts in which he and Marriott International Inc. CEO Arne ...

Bloomberg U.K. house prices increased for a ninth month in March as rental investors rushed to purchase property before a tax increase, Nationwide Building Society said. The average price of a home rose 0.8 percent from February to 200,251 pounds ($287,280), the lender said in a statement on Monday. The annual rate of growth surged to 5.7 percent, the strongest ...

Bloomberg The average price of a Manhattan apartment topped $2 million for the first time, reflecting the closing of deals from a high-end buying frenzy that’s now showing signs of a slowdown. Buyers in the first quarter took ownership of condominiums in some of New York’s most-expensive developments after signing contracts as far back as three years ago, when construction ...

DUBAI \ EMIRATES BUSINESS London was the most attractive market for Chestertons’ MENA investors, with more than AED 265 million invested into the UK capital’s real estate market. This represented over 70% of their total sales of nearly AED 379 million. “London has long been a favoured destination for investors from the Middle East region, it is a mature, well ...

Bloomberg Iron ore will probably snap back to $45 a metric ton as a nascent real-estate rebound in China won’t bolster construction demand in the world’s biggest user and supplies remain plentiful, according to McKinsey & Co. The commodity will trade between $45 and $50 a ton this year, eroding a first-quarter rally to as high as $63.74 that was ...