Ryan Serhant and Bess Friendman (Getty, Illustration by Shea Monahan for The Real Deal)
The word “schmendrick” — a Yiddish word for fool — doesn’t get thrown around much in the news.
But it’s 2023, and the world — due to the pandemic and unrelenting march of technological advances, among other things — looks and operates a lot differently than just a few short years ago.
The new and the old collided last week when a salesperson for Ryan Serhant’s two-year-old brokerage Serhant Ventures offered to coach brokers at the storied New York City residential firm Brown Harris Stevens. The overture from a young firm with roots in reality television was met with a less-than-enthusiastic response.
“There is a fine line between being unorthodox and being a schmendrick,” Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman replied. “Thank you but we are going to pass.”’
Still, other legacy players over the past week either made waves or were roiled due to the ever shifting landscape.
Wells Fargo, a major player in the U.S. mortgage market, announced it is pulling back from the sector. At its peak, the bank was responsible for one in every three home loans in the U.S. It currently ranks third among mortgage lenders, behind Rocket Mortgage and United Wholesale Mortgage.
In addition, rising rates have had a huge impact on some developers, most notably the Chetrit Group is facing default on a $481 million loan on properties that the firm is looking to sell.
In the case of Joe Sitt and Maverick Real Estate Partners, it only took one week for friends to become frenemies, if not foes. Sitt, who recently called Maverick “upstanding and honest,” may be rethinking his choice of words, with Maverick seeking to foreclose on a retail building owned by Sitt’s Thor Equities. Maverick alleges Thor defaulted on a $25.5 million loan secured by the property at 446 West 14th Street.
And, notorious liar and newly sworn-in member of the U.S. House of Representatives, George Santos, did what he does best by spinning an old story concerning the state’s rent relief program, which still has open loopholes that permit tenants to exploit the system at landlords’ expense.
Tech layoffs, remote work and rising interest rates have the office markets in Los Angeles and San Francisco plummeting.
Veritas Investments is in default on a nearly $450 million loan secured by 62 of its San Francisco rent-controlled apartment properties.
Rimini software service company Rimini Street is subleasing its 70,000-square-foot offices in Pleasanton. San Francisco-based Visa is pulling out of Palo Alto, having listed its 64,000-square-foot offices for sublease. And construction and engineering software firm Autodesk will put 73,000 square feet of offices on the market for sublease at One Market Street in San Francisco.
In Texas, the very modern problem of water demand halted a new development project in a Houston suburb.
In Chicago, Apollo Global Management has taken control of the iconic Chicago Board of Trade Building and has hired a developer with an eye on renovating the property and exploring non-office uses.
With developments like these, even a schmendrick can see it was a wild week for real estate across the board.
