In the Press

Long Island City, NY Joe Berko and Michael Korine of Berko & Associates along with Madison Realty Capital (MRC) completed a $27 million first mortgage loan to recapitalize on the Paper Factory Hotel at 37-06 36th St., which will open later this month. The borrower purchased the six-story 103,000 s/f warehouse in 2012 and turned

Early this year, the outlook appeared grim for the owners of 280 Park Ave. Vacancy rates were ballooning, and cash reserves were dwindling. But Broadway Partners and Investcorp Real Estate Group still had to service huge debt they’d taken on when they bought the 1.2 million-square-foot, two-tower property at the height of the market in

Joe Berko was on a visit to Brazil when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. “I was watching CNN and I knew: This is it. Something big just happened,” he recalled. When he returned to the U.S., he found a financial system that had gone into cardiac arrest. Berko’s promising, three-year-old investment

One aspect of the current cycle of recovery in the commercial real estate market is the continual increase in the cost of construction, a facet of the process that most do not think of when deliberating their next project in the midst of the development boom. The costs of materials and labor have increased as

Joe Berko and Michael Korine of Berko & Associates recently completed a $27 million first mortgage loan to recapitalize on the Paper Factory Hotel al 37-06 36th Street in Long Island City, The borrower purchased the six-story 103,000-square-foot Long Island City warehouse in 2012 and turned the former paper factory and industrial property into a

The Real Deal – Madison Realty Capital continues to make moves in Queens, with the real estate investment firm on the verge of closing on a five-parcel assemblage in Woodside for around $31 million, sources told The Real Deal. The assemblage — located on a block bound by Queens Boulevard, 47th Avenue and 69th and

There are multiple billions worth of new developments on one Manhattan block alone, each setting new, unique records and each requiring new, creative ways to finance them. Before the crash, CMBS was a popular source of debt, totaling $230 billion in activity in 2007. Those days are gone. In the past two years, EB-5 has

After a run-up in pricing that even some of the industry’s most bullish observers find head spinning, Manhattan’s luxury retail market is starting to show cracks, and that could put its most active lenders on the line. Big banks such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and France’s Crédit Agricole, as well as

NYREJ – Berko & Associates has closed on the sale of two connected four-story, loft office buildings located at 201-209 46th St. on the corner of 2nd Ave. in the Sunset Park neighborhood. The property sold for $15.5 million, at $290 per s/f above grade, a record for the area, suggesting a still-healthy appetite within

The New York Yankees are seeking to become the latest professional sports club in the region to take advantage of record-low interest rates to lower borrowing costs by refinancing about $1 billion of bonds issued to build the team’s new stadium. The refinancing by the Yankees, who are second-to-last place in their division, was disclosed