News & Insights

If the redevelopment of the Steinway & Sons piano store in Midtown were a song, it would be a long one, with some dramatic pauses and a bit of dissonance. But despite the project’s yearslong struggles with escalating costs, infighting and lawsuits, the developers of the sky-high condo at 111 West 57th Street hope the building will still impress potential buyers.

With so many active construction projects in progress in New York at any given time, one could be forgiven for thinking that financing for those properties is relatively easy to secure.

Commercial Observer’s Finance Weekly sat down with Robert Schwartz to learn more about Spruce Capital and S3 Capital.

A partnership between New York-based Spruce Capital Partners and Connecticut-based Post Road Properties received a $65.2 million Freddie Mac-secured loan for Hawthorne Court, a 434-unit multifamily complex in Central Islip, N.Y.

Katie Couric and her husband bought an apartment on the entire 10th floor of 151 East 78th Street, a new limestone and brick condominium on the Upper East Side. At $12,168,087.50, the transaction was one of the most expensive sales of the week, according to city records.

A five-story, fully renovated townhouse at 42 West 71st Street near Central Park West was sold by Spruce Capital Partners for $18,355,000.

A sprawling aerie on the 67th floor of One57, Extell Development’s glassy-blueskyscraper, where the city’s priciest transaction for a single residence took placeearlier this year, sold to an undisclosed buyer for $28,005,375 and was the mostexpensive sale of the week, according to city records.

Why, in 2015, would any-one want to build a classi-cal building? The answer: to reconnect present-day archi-tecture and city building with American political ideals, his-tory, and culture. This impulse, more common today than in several generations, reflects an irony of the architectural world: the avant-gardeis now composed of classical archi-tects, while the establishment, and especially the academy, is the fiefdom of modernists.

The two units in 151 East 78th Street have gone into contract for their asking prices of $29.5 million and $27.5 million respectively.

The Latest crop of luxury residential developments is breaking ground in a whole new way by bringing interior designers and architects better known for their work in hotels, restaurants, and product design – along with swanky private homes.

A girtty neighborhood undergoes a transformation with new apartments.

Ah, Greenwich Village, a land of stately tree-lined streets, historic townhomes and scaffolding … lots and lots of scaffolding.

Robert Schwartz and Joshua Crane, co-founders of real estate development and investment fi rm Spruce Capital Partners, looked at dozens of townhouses before they purchased this property on Waverly Place through an LLC in 2010 for $6.85 million. ‘We were looking all over in the Villlage and everything was either very small or too pricey,’ said Mr. Crane. ‘Th is one hit all the boxes where we thought we could create a very dramatic house with architectural signifi cance,’ he said.

Finding a townhouse on West 71st Street (between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, specifically) may not be that surprising, but a brand new townhouse?

A year and a half ago, the Observer chronicled the real estate happenings on a block of East 78th Street, where Spruce Capital Partners went on something of a buying spree, snapping up the Ackerman Institute at 151 East 78th Street and a conjoined townhouse at 153-155 East 78th.

The largest penthouse at Upper East Side con-dominium building 151 East 78th Street hit the market for $29.5 million. The price tag exceeds the $29 million total that developer Spruce Capital Partners paid for the property in 2012.

Sales launched today at 151 East 78th Street, an Upper East Side condominium project by Spruce Capital Partners. One unit, a duplex penthouse boasting six bedrooms, carries an asking price of $27.5 million, a representative of Spruce told The Real Deal exclusively.

This has been a punishing winter for New Yorkers. Not the schizo temperature shi”s (although, we concede, those weren’t exactly fun, either) — we’re talking about the lack of available residential real estate. According to the fourth quarter 2013 reports by appraisal #rm Miller Samuel, NYC was at its lowest level of inventory in 14 years.

Developers have long profited from renovating out-of-date prewar apartment buildings to create interiors pleasing to today’s buyers. But many are now building entirely from the ground up, in a style harking back to the era before World War II; the trend is particularly evident on the limestone-clad Upper East Side.

It’s a big day for expensive new projects on the Upper East Side. Where there once were town houses, now there will be this. Spruce Capital Partners’ 151 East 78th Street will rise 16 stories and house just 14 apartments. First came a facade rendering, then some signage, but all that’s in the past because now there’s a teaser site and all-new images of the updated facade, interiors, and outdoor spaces.

In its demure and quiet way, a new development at 151 East 78th Street looks to be one of the more promising projects in the city, even though its actual construction has not yet begun.

Spruce Capital Partners has put a new 8,300-square-foot Upper West Side townhouse on the market asking $23.5 million, a spokesperson for the developer told The Real Deal exclusively. The five-story home is located at 42 West 71st Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue and has six bedrooms and seven full bathrooms.

Is there a new housing development in the works for East 78th Street? We can’t say for sure, but it definitely looks like some funny business is afoot on the block between Lexington and Third avenues.

An 11,000-square-foot apartment building converted into a single-family townhouse in Greenwich Village has hit the market for $34 million — five times what it sold for just four years ago.