News
WHAT DO JAY-Z & BRUCE RATNER HAVE IN COMMON?
February 1, 2012
| The answer is Brooklyn basketball. One is the dictionary definition of cool, and the other describes himself as "the opposite of cool." Both, however, are icons in their industries, and both are part owners in the soon-to-be-Brooklyn Nets NBA franchise. |
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| Last night at the Barclays Center Showroom in the New York Times Building, Forest City Ratner CEO Bruce Ratner (third from left) said Barclays Center has $300M of equity in it, a huger-than-usual financial status for arenas and stadiums. (Or is it arenae and stadia? Anyone over there at Princeton study Latin?) The finances are the result of a storied past that includes a Supreme Court eminent domain case and a tax-exempt financing opportunity that would expire in the middle of a recession. The more trouble and time, the more equity needed. We snapped him with Phillips Nizer real estate chair Mark Landis, Kensington Vanguard National Land Services'Jeremy Glantz, W. P. Carey COO Tom Zacharias, JLL's Christine Espenshade, and Ferro Kuba Mangano Skylar partner Lance Kuba. |
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| Bruce says the deal for Atlantic Yards and Barclays Center (modeled above) closed at the buzzer on Dec. 23, '09, but the letter of credit got lost in the Christmas mail (again, it was due by Dec. 31), so a connection of a connection helped close the UPS center in Queens til the letter was found. (Jeez, we can't even get our friends to save us a seat at the movies.) "For us, construction was always the easy part," he says. "Getting there is the hard part." In fact, he advises his children: "Forget the outcome. Focus on the process and who you're with." Forest City Ratner also won the eminent domain case in November '09. We asked Bruce about a similar case sprouting up around Willets Point, and while he declined to comment, a member of the peanut gallery called it the "Boulevard of Broken Glass." Bruce did answer a question about what constitutes blight: "That's a question for the Supreme Court," he says. |
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| Here are Nets CEO Brett Yormark and Jeremy (random fact alert: each of them is one half of a set of identical twins), along with former Comcast real estate SVP Liv Biddle and Tom. Jeremy is also founder of the 10-month-old Princeton Real Estate Network, which hosted the event. |
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| We caught up with CBRE's Bob Flippin as he was catching up with high school buddy Debra Kushma of Precise Advisory Group. They both moved to Princeton in middle school, each with Princeton prof parents, and attended Princeton High and Princeton U together. |
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| We also snapped Nets Basketball's Ebony Jenkins and AREA Property Partners' Jim Simmons, who tells us his firm will announce a big apartment deal in the DC metro soon. |
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| Consultant Carolyn Law (with Joe Studholme and Bentley Associates' Stephen Graham) tells us her practice has taken her into military housing privatization, transit studies, and market feasibility studies. That all means a lot of public/private partnerships —and lots of acronyms. |
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| We really just wanted to see how many pictures we could take of Christine (with residential architect Carlo Balestri) in one day. Our first one was around 8am yesterday in Baltimore, where she was speaking at Bisnow's Affordable Housing Summit. She had another meeting in Baltimore, then hopped the train 200 miles up to New York only to find us and our camera on the 38th floor pointed her way yet again. After a meeting or two today, she's off to DC before landing back home in Baltimore. |
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| Brett says Barclays Center will open on Sept. 28 with a concert from Jay-Z, and the Islanders and Devils will play a little pre-season hockey there Oct. 2. Bruce confesses he didn't know much about Jay-Z before their first meeting, but when the hip-hop mogul climbed out of his car and was swarmed by teenagers from out of nowhere, the real estate mogul thought, "Yes, this is my partner." While Jay-Z and Bruce are part owners of the Nets, Brett has returned the favor as part owner of Barclays Center. |
