Real Estate

  Bloomberg Washington’s Watergate office building, made famous by the political scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon, is under contract to be sold. New York real estate investment firm Steinbridge Group and Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. are buying 2500 and 2600 Virginia Ave. NW, also known as Watergate East, for $107 million, according to the document by brokerage ...

  Bloomberg Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers, an asset manager owned by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., agreed to buy ACRE Capital Holdings LLC in a bet on multifamily loans. Cornerstone agreed to pay $93 million to purchase the Plano, Texas-based lender from Ares Commercial Real Estate Corp., the buyer said on Wednesday in a statement. The deal will double Cornerstone’s ...

  Bloomberg Homebuilder Sunac China Holdings Ltd. has temporarily stopped buying land from government auctions in China because prices surged amid a housing rebound, Chairman Sun Hongbin said. “We’ve suspended all bidding recently and didn’t even sign up” for auctions by local governments, Sun said at a briefing. “I feel the risk is too high,” he said without giving a ...

  Bloomberg Canada’s province of British Columbia will end self-regulation of the real estate industry as government officials move to rein in unethical practices that may be stoking home prices in Vancouver, one of North America’s fastest-appreciating cities. “The real estate sector has had 10 years to get it right on self regulation and they haven’t,” Premier Christy Clark said. ...

  Bloomberg Office landlords are bracing for a cooling of San Francisco’s red-hot market as weaker startup valuations and lower venture-capital funding temper years of runaway growth in the technology-industry hub. The city’s office-vacancy rate jumped in the second quarter by the most since the last recession, while the amount of space available for sublease almost doubled, according to a ...

  Bloomberg Allianz Real Estate is set to make its biggest Asian investment to date, in a first step toward adding as much 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) of real estate in the region within three years. The $150 million pan-Asian fund investment will allow Allianz SE’s property unit to test the water before buying buildings directly, Francois Trausch, chief ...

  AFP Barcelona city hall on Tuesday announced a 20-fold hike, to €600,000 euros ($660,000), in the maximum fine that can be levied against home rental sites such as Airbnb if they promote illegal accommodation. Under a 2012 regional law, any apartment rented to visitors in Catalonia must be logged in the province’s Tourism Registry and have a permit. In ...

  AP U.S. home prices scaled new heights in April, with seven cities — Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon — setting highs. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index rose 5.4 percent in April compared with a year earlier, just below the 5.5 percent year-over-year gain posted in March. Home values are now just ...

  Bloomberg In 1910, an attorney named Albert Barnes Boardman bought close to 10 acres in downtown Southampton, N.Y., and spent $250,000 (approximately $30 million today) to build a 24-room, four-story mansion modeled after the Villa Medici in Rome. There were formal gardens, fountains, sprawling lawns, a tennis court, and a gatehouse. Boardman owned it until 1927, after which the ...

  Bloomberg London may have just shed its safe-haven property market tag with the U.K.’s vote to break away from the European Union. That’s good news for real estate markets in Asia that offer stability. Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, which face headwinds including oversupply and high prices, may see money flowing into property as investors flee to safer assets ...