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 ...

  Tehran / Reuters Iran’s oil exports in July are set to fall from June levels as the country battles Saudi Arabia and Iraq for market share but are about 70 percent higher than a year ago, according to a source with knowledge of the country’s crude lifting plans. Exports will be about 2.14 million barrels per day (bpd) in ...

  RIYADH / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s L’azurde Company for Jewellery, which surged on its trading debut in Riyadh on Wednesday, plans to almost double the number of its branches in the MENA by 2018. Chief Executive Selim Chidiac told Reuters that market conditions in Saudi Arabia were very challenging as consumers have been hit by the slide in oil prices, ...

  Jeddah / Emirates Business The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has moved up the rankings to finish in the ‘Semi-Transparent’ category for the first time in the JLL and LaSalle Investment Management’s 2016 Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI). Strong advances over the past two years have seen Saudi Arabia (63rd) and Egypt (65th) move into the dynamic ‘Semi-Transparent’ ...

  Jeddah / TNS Young Saudis who recently joined the sale and maintenance of mobile phone market are raving about their experience and high financial returns, which they attribute to the decision to nationalize the sector and allow many young Saudis access to job opportunities and ownership of such shops. Seller Abdullah Ani, who works at a mobile shop, says ...

  Jordan / TNS Plans are in place to set up new stations to monitor air pollution in industrial areas in Jordan, officials at the Ministry of Environment said. The ministry will also enhance the performance of the 14 stations currently set up in Amman, Irbid and Zarqa, which are electronically linked to the ministry to test air pollution levels, ...