The building in the Westlake area (Redfin) and BRE’s David Bramante (BRE)

The tenants of an eight-unit apartment building at 240 N Robinson Street in Historic Filipinotown are suing its owner, an entity connected to the brokerage BRE Investment. In a lawsuit filed last week, the tenants claim BRE ignored the city’s rent control laws in an effort to evict them, Curbed reported.

The lawsuit — filed against BRE, its CEO David Bramante, and several other related defendants — alleges that Bramante pressured the eight families that live in the building into moving out so he could renovate and sell the property — an assertion that Bramante denies, according to Curbed.

Redfin shows the property as under contract to sell, with Bramante as the listing agent, but The Real Deal could verify whether that information is correct. Bramante could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to the suit, Bramante and the previous owners of the building created a tenant habitability plan — required by the city’s rent stabilization ordinance — that proposed relocating tenants to non-existing housing, such as a cemetery, Curbed reported.

But Bramante told Curbed that this was a mistake made under previous ownership that had been fixed more than a year ago.

BRE acquired the building in April 2016 for $1.25 million, property records show. It managed the property before it bought it outright, according to Curbed. The suit claims that BRE and the previous owners gave half the tenants eviction notices between March and December 2016.

The eight families who live in the building are being represented by the Inner City Law Center and other attorneys. [Curbed] — Cathaleen Chen

TRD LA’s January issue

We are pleased to announce that our next print magazine is almost here! The April issue will feature a major developer profile, rankings, market trend analysis and a healthy dose of controversy.

The issue will include the first in L.A.’s Closing interview series — a longtime staple in our New York magazine. It will also include a deep dive into Downtown’s retail market; a look at L.A.’s top real estate families; a ranking of top brokers and an analysis of residential development trends. We will reach just outside of L.A. to give readers a Southern California market snapshot, with a focus on sunny Palm Springs.

See the January edition as it appears in print here.

To subscribe to the magazine, obtain a media kit — and for all advertising inquiries — please call Frank Morales at (310) 270-8124 or contact fm@therealdeal.com. The final deadline for advertising is March 28.

Current reader favorites:

1. Billionaire Stan Druckenmiller shells out $36M for Malibu pad
2. Steve Witkoff makes resi play at Fred Segal site in Santa Monica
3. Median rent is higher in DTLA than Bel Air: report
4. Academy Museum switches builders amidst construction
5. At $75M, LA’s biggest spec home was built to be “billionaire’s paradise”

Deutsche Bank’s John Cryan

From the New York website: Deutsche Bank may fund billions in new home loans to low-income borrowers as part of a settlement with the United States Justice Department.

In January, the German lender reached a $7.2 billion deal with prosecutors to settle an investigation into its pre-crisis mortgage bond deals. As part of the settlement, the bank agreed to offer $4.1 billion in “relief” to borrowers.

Initially, Deutsche Bank had planned to do so by lending to firms that buy and restructure delinquent mortgages. But Bloomberg reports the bank is now finding that there simply aren’t enough of those, almost nine years after the financial crash.

So the bank is looking to provide so-called warehouse loans to lenders that issue new mortgages to borrowers with poor credit. These loans allow mortgage issuers to bridge the gap between issuing loans to homeowners and bundling them as bonds and selling them off to investors.

“The people hurt most by Deutsche Bank and Wall Street are low-income people, so the interest is to reach into that community and help them with down payment assistance or loans that they couldn’t otherwise get,” Ira Rheingold of the National Association of Consumer Advocates told Bloomberg [Bloomberg] — Konrad Putzier 

George Ochs and Doug Wolfley

Bellwether Enterprise, the commercial mortgage banking firm, hired 22 new employees to expand its footprint in California. Bellwether, a subsidiary of Enterprise Community Investment, will open new offices in Los angeles and San Diego, as well as expand its existing office in Irvine to coincide with the hiring spree.

The expansion is slated to add more than $1 billion in annual loan volume to the company’s books, a spokesperson said. The new hires include nine originators, four servicing staff and nine support staff.

The new recruits “have long-standing relationships in the region and have been working together in Southern California for the past 20 years,” Ned Huffman, president of Bellwether, said in a statement.

CityView also has a fresh face in its ranks. The development firm poached George Ochs from JPMorgan to be its senior vice president and head of investor relations. Ochs was a managing director at JPMorgan Asset Management, where he specialized in managing real estate portfolios.

At CityView, Ochs will help expand the firm’s relationships with institutional investors, pension funds and insurance companies, according to the company’s CEO, Sean Burton. Ochs also previously served as a senior vice president for Prudential Financial.

Meanwhile, Inception Property Group poached Doug Wolfley, the former real estate manager of Kaiser Permanente, to lead acquisitions throughout Southern California. Wolfley previously held broker positions at Cushman & Wakefield, Lee & Associates, and NAI Capital.

Apartmenthunterz.com and CoStar CEO Andrew Florance

Commercial real estate data company CoStar Group has scored a significant victory in its ongoing crusade against alleged data theft.

A federal judge has issued an injunction against Orange County-based Apartment Hunters, finding it liable for publishing listings and photographs stolen from CoStar-owned Apartments.com.

The judge ordered Apartment Hunters, which owns ApartmentHunterz.com, to cease publishing the listings, add a copyright filter to its system and pay $10,000 per day, per photograph in the event of further infringement. It will also pay damages of $10,000 per stolen listing and $10,000 per infringed image.

“[I]f investors provide a billion dollars to CoStar to fund extensive collection of information that is valuable to millions of renters, those investors need to know that a company like Apartment Hunters cannot casually publish that information and call it their own,” CoStar CEO Andrew Florance said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Apartment Hunters could not be reached and several phone numbers connected to the company seemed to be out of service.

Last month, Apartment Hunters filed a response to CoStar’s allegations, denying all claims. The company, headed by Kevin and Steven Shayan, argued that CoStar failed to properly identify its copyrighted material.

CoStar has taken legal action against multiple of its competitors, alleging infringement. In December, it sued its biggest rival Xceligent, accusing the company of “piracy” and “copyright infringement on an industrial scale” and claiming Xceligent’s researchers regularly trawled CoStar’s and LoopNet’s (now a CoStar subsidiary) databases to steal property data and images. The complaint mirrored previous lawsuits against data startups RealMassive, LoopNet and against users of CompStak.

Xceligent has denied the claims. — Cathaleen Chen

From the New York website: In a year of uncertainty, professional pessimists finally have a tool to short the private real estate market.

Financial services firm Global Index Group on Wednesday launched a synthetic investment product tied to the performance of the NCREIF Index, which tracks the return on privately held real estate in the U.S. As with traditional swaps, customers can choose to go either short or long. CBRE Capital Advisors, CBRE’s investment banking arm, is selling the product, dubbed duETS (short for Down/Up Equity Trust Securities).

There are already plenty of products that allow investors to short publicly traded real estate investment trusts or mortgage securities. But private real estate markets lacked that option despite a few short-lived attempts at creating them. The problem is that it’s easy to buy or borrow (the equivalent of going long or short) REIT stocks or CMBS at a moment’s notice. It’s a lot harder to buy buildings.

Here’s how GIG, which develops index-based financial products, is trying to solve the dilemma: duETS buyers don’t actually invest in real estate. They are basically gambling on the performance of the NCREIF Index. The money they spend gets converted into treasury bonds. Bank of New York Mellon holds the bonds, acting as a sort of casino bank. After a period of up to two years, the bank sells the bonds and the investors get their payout, including interest. If their bet was a good one, they’ll get more back. But it’s a zero-sum game: one investor’s gain is another one’s loss. In the interim, they are free to sell their duETS positions to other institutions (duETS is open to financial firms with over $100 million in assets under management).

“We think REITs are a fine instrument but if you look at the total real estate market it’s less than five percent,” said GIG’s CEO Kelly Haughton. Tying investment products to the NCREIF Index allows investors to bet on a bigger part of the market, he argued.

DuETS’ launch comes at an opportune time. With interest rates set to rise, the market cycle possibly nearing an end, and an unpredictable man in the White House, the is more uncertainty than ever.  This should increase demand for shorting and hedging tools.

“I think that for us the important thing is if there’s a variety of opinions about what’s going to happen,” Haughton said. He also argued that viable hedging tools are the hallmarks of an efficient market, and should help prevent asset bubbles.

CBRE Capital Advisors’ Phil Barker said he hoped duETS will open the private real estate market to new investors. “It will enable non-traditional players to participate, like hedge funds,” he said. “This is something of a game changer.”

Rendering of Alexan South Broadway (Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council)

Members of the Eastern Columbia Homeowners Association and the Society for the Preservation of Downtown Los Angeles (SP-DTLA) suffered a setback Tuesday in their battles against Trammell Crow’s Alexan South Broadway development.

The City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee rejected both of the groups’ appeals to the council’s approval of the 27-story residential tower in Downtown Los Angeles. 

The city’s planning department approved the 305-unit development in July but opponents of the project quickly filed an appeal, Curbed reported.

SP-DTLA, which includes residents from the Eastern Columbia building next door, hired high-profile attorney Robert Silverstein to plead their case — that the project should be subject to a new environmental review following changes to the building’s design.

Planning staff said the addendum to the original plans filed by Trammell Crow was enough and the design changes were not significant enough to create any negative effects, according to Curbed.

The committee voted unanimously to reject the appeals. [Curbed] — Subrina Hudson

The firms of Douglas Elliman’s Howard Lorber (left), The Agency’s Mauricio Umansky (middle) and Compass’ Robert Reffkin (right) have all poached top producers from other brokerages. (Illustration by Guy Parsons)

From the L.A. print archives: The booming Los Angeles housing market has become the new frontier for residential brokerages from other parts of the country, particularly New York. Over the past few years, firms such as Douglas Elliman, New York’s largest brokerage, and Compass, an aggressive venture-capital-backed startup from the Big Apple, have trotted into the L.A. market, opening flashy new offices and trying to woo top agents from veteran L.A. companies.

Their entry comes five years after two powerful agents, Mauricio Umansky and Billy Rose, formed their own company, The Agency, adding to a field that includes existing behemoths such as Sotheby’s International Realty and Coldwell Banker.

All of a sudden, the market is looking extremely crowded and competition for top talent is at an all-time high.

The free-for-all has sent commission splits skyrocketing and margins sinking, brokerage chiefs told The Real Deal. With so many firms vying to sign top producers, hiring managers are being forced to come up with ever more generous offers and compelling reasons for a broker to jump ship.

Brokers are getting used to the new gold standard and have taken advantage of market conditions by hopping between firms.

“I have had brand-new agents coming in requesting, and some even expecting, a split that I would not give anyone, regardless of their productivity,” said Colin Keenan, a senior vice president at Douglas Elliman’s Beverly Hills office. “There is a sense of entitlement and an impatience. People just want to see an offer. They don’t necessarily want to be schmoozed and wined and dined, although they’ll take that, too, if it’s offered.”

But most realize it’s a race to the bottom. With L.A.’s standard commission splits already much higher than their counterparts in cities such as New York, brokerage operators can’t afford to get into a “how low can you go?” tug-of-war. At the end of the day, they have to make money.

(Click to enlarge)

“It’s a very dangerous thing for the industry as a whole,” said John Aaroe, founder of John Aaroe Group, a high-end brokerage. “The brokerage business is one in which you make your money on the nickel, not on the dollar. You can’t give dollars away when you make your profits in nickels.”

That’s particularly true since the high-end L.A. market has more recently shown signs of topping out.

The median price for a luxury single-family property — defined as being among the top 10 percent of sales based on price — dropped by 0.3 percent in the second quarter, while the median price for the overall market increased by 5.7 percent, according to Elliman data.

“Some brokerages have realized that they’re biting off more than they can chew,” said Sunny Magner, Elliman’s vice president of people and culture. “At the price you have to pay to get these top producers, it’s sometimes just not worth it.”

Some of the region’s top agents are also wary of the industry’s revolving door.

Ben Bacal, a top-producing agent at Rodeo Realty, said he’s not playing the game.

“I think it’s a bunch of hype and rumors and people should just focus on selling real estate,” he said. “Everyone thinks moving firms will help their business so much, but it won’t.”

Jade Mills, Coldwell Banker’s top agent and one of the industry’s most sought-after producers, agrees. “I’ve never changed companies,” she said. “How successful you are as an agent comes from you as a person. It doesn’t really come from the company.  It’s the agent and her personal relationships.”

The Big Splash

Many of the most active top producers in the L.A. market are actually owners or partners in their own firms, making poaching more challenging. Three of the top agents are Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland, Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency and Umansky. Those agents cannot be wooed, short of acquiring their entire companies.

That leaves newcomers with a small pool of heavy hitters to pick off, from firms such as Coldwell Banker and Sotheby’s International Realty.

Douglas Elliman’s swanky Beverly Hills office, which opened in 2014.

When Elliman — one of the nation’s oldest and largest real estate brokerages, currently led by Chairman Howard Lorber — launched in Beverly Hills in 2014, the firm was eager to make a splash. It quickly nabbed brothers Josh and Matt Altman, stars of Bravo’s hit series “Million Dollar Listing,” from 23-year-old Hilton & Hyland, which ranks second on TRD’s list of top luxury brokerages in L.A. County.

Stephen Kotler, Elliman’s chief revenue officer of residential brokerage, relocated to the West Coast from New York to oversee the expansion and is reportedly looking to hire 80 to 100 more brokers within the next year. He said he spends half his time working toward recruiting brokers from competing firms.

Some say the situation is becoming a free-for-all. Just as TRD was heading to print at the end of August, David Findley and David Kelmenson of Partners Trust hopped to The Agency, the Beverly Hills firm that came in third on TRD’s ranking.

But Compass, in particular, has taken poaching to a new level, picking up agents en masse from firms such as The Agency and Coldwell Banker. The heads of competing firms are so upset, they’ve nicknamed the company “Comp-ASS.”

From Coldwell, Compass poached Stan Richman, mother-and-son team Linda and Brent Chang, and Sabrina Wu. From The Agency, it poached Kofi Nartey and Hana Cha, the managing director of The Agency’s new development division. Eastside broker duo Kurt Wisner and Courtney Smith also joined from Beverly Hills-based Nourmand & Associates earlier in 2016.

Among competitors, rumors are rife that Compass is forking out six-figure signing bonuses to recruit top talent.

“You have several companies trying to slice up the pie, but the pie is not getting any bigger,” said Hyland, one of his firm’s founding partners. “It’s become a food fight.”

For its part, Compass has denied offering brokers outrageous bonuses or compensation packages. CEO Robert Reffkin claims that only 1 percent of top agent recruits are offered bonuses, and only a “very small minority” of new hires have been offered equity in the company.

“I know they have wanted some people very badly, and some have been offered more money than others,” Mills said. “I feel that I’ve been very open to hearing everything, but in the end I just think that it all comes down to hard work and Coldwell Banker has been very supportive and it comes down to loyalty.”

Keenan also said executives recognize that it’s important Elliman not hand out top-dollar offers to every broker that walks in the door, or the company risks significantly compromising its potential profit margin.

(Click to enlarge)

As a result, some firms have focused their attention on attracting brokers who perhaps aren’t closing $100 million deals, and don’t have the name recognition that goes with that, but are doing a large volume of transactions in a lower price range. Those agents can really drive the value of the firm and are easier to recruit, they said.

“You have to be careful, and you have to be disciplined,” Keenan said.

Stacking up

Despite the best efforts of newbie firms, national powerhouses Sotheby’s and Coldwell Banker still control most of the region’s volume of deals, and boutique firm Hilton & Hyland controls the lion’s share of the über-luxury market in areas such as Beverly Hills from its single office.

TRD’s inaugural ranking of L.A. firms shows that, for sales valued at $5 million and above, Coldwell Banker had the largest market share of any firm in the region, selling $1.12 billion across 11 offices. And, despite only having one office, Hilton & Hyland was not far behind, with $895.1 million in sales.

Hilton & Hyland alumni Mauricio Umansky and Billy Rose have seemingly had tremendous success in a short time with their five-year-old startup, posting $759.3 million in sales across just three offices. In fourth place was Sotheby’s International Realty, with $434.9 million in sales over $5 million.

Meanwhile, Compass, which has been open for less than a year, posted $66.2 million in sales, while Elliman logged in $137.2 million in sales priced over $5 million.

The five top-performing offices in L.A. County by sales over $5 million were all in Beverly Hills, starting with Hilton & Hyland. The Agency and Coldwell Banker offices came in at second and third, respectively.

Still, some said it might be too early to tell whether or not the region’s newcomers will succeed.

“It’s not how they do the first six or 12 months that tells the story of whether they’re going to be successful or not,” Aaroe said. “It’s a look back at the end of the second or third year. I’ve seen new players come into this market before and not be able to achieve liftoff by then.”

Stradella Road home (MLS)

Andy Heyward, CEO of entertainment company Genius Brands International, is ready to leave his Bel Air home behind.

The co-creator of the popular children’s show “Inspector Gadget” listed his 5,040-square-foot property last week with an asking price of $10.5 million.

The property on Stradella Road made it into the top five of The Real Deal’s priciest home listings in Los Angeles last week.

The five-bedroom, five-bathroom home sits on more than an acre of land and features a wrap-around terrace, the Los Angeles Times reported. There’s a separate maid’s room and a screening room with a secret door to a gym.

Heyward purchased the home in 2014 for $7.25 million. It was built in 2011 and was previously owned by Jay Penske, founder of Penske Media Corp.

Heyward’s credits include shows “Sailor Moon,” “Captain Planet,” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

Myra Nourmand and Bahar Soomekh of Nourmand & Associates have the listing. [LAT] — Subrina Hudson

Rendering of the Arts Club West Hollywood (credit: Gensler)

West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister is wary of the hotel boom sweeping the city.

So wary, in fact, that she will bring a proposal to City Council on Monday calling for a moratorium on new hotel development until West Hollywood conducts a study on the economic impacts of a room surplus.

In her proposal, Meister cites a study conducted by PFK Consulting and CBRE Hotels last year, which predicted the volume of projects in the pipeline could reduce occupancy and hotel room rates, Wehoville reported. If all 1,229 rooms in hotel projects in the pipeline are completed — an almost 60 percent increase in inventory — WeHo’s hotel room occupancy rate could fall from its current average of 80 percent to 68 percent in 2020, the report predicted.

In response to the report, Atlas Hospitality Group said the surplus of rooms would “cannibalize the market” and potentially decrease the hotel room tax taken in by the city by as much as $1 million in 2020 and 2021.

Meister argues these warnings were not given enough attention. The council “received and filed” the information without taking action, she told Wehoville. Additionally, the PKF report did not take into account four hotel projects under consideration in the city, as well as those cropping up surrounding areas such as Beverly Hills, she said.

Meister will ask that the city consider ways to diversify its tourism-dependent economy, Wehoville reported.

“If there is another recession we need to know where our revenue is coming from,” she told the website.

A moratorium would put several major hotel projects in jeopardy, including the 149-key Pendry hotel, Faring Capital’s proposed 251-room Robertson Lane project and the Gwyneth Paltrow-affiliated Arts Club at at 8920 Sunset Boulevard. [Wehoville] — Hannah Miet

Current reader favorites:

1. Billionaire Stan Druckenmiller shells out $36M for Malibu pad
2. Steve Witkoff makes resi play at Fred Segal site in SaMo
3. Solar company buys Grammy building from HPP for $35M
4. DTLA condo development hits fastest pace since crash: report
5. Apartment Hunters found liable in CoStar copyright dispute

Dustin Hoffman and a rendering of the spec home Hofai wanted to build at 1550 Blue Jay Way

Dustin Hoffman and his son Jacob invested $3 million in an ill-fated spec house project headed by Jeffrey Yohai, the son-in-law of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Hoffmans made the investment in June 2015 through an entity called DJ Blue Jay Way. No record shows that they have been repaid, the Times said.

Yohai filed for bankruptcy protection for the Bird Streets property and three others in December, on the heels of a lawsuit that accused him of running a Ponzi scheme in New York. The bankruptcy filing stayed a trustee’s sale that was scheduled for November.

Yohai, who planned to replace an existing home on the site with a new $30 million mansion, withdrew the Hoffmans’ money  without their “prior knowledge or approval,” despite a guarantee that he would not spend certain funds without their permission, according to the bankruptcy documents .

Meanwhile, Manafort is now the subject of an FBI investigation on whether any of his income came from corrupt sources behind pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians. He’s a key player in the investigation of Trump associates suspected of knowing or colluding in Russia’s alleged meddling in the November presidential election. [LAT] — Cathaleen Chen

Rendering of Analema Tower (via Cloud Architecture Office)

From the New York website: The pitch to lenders could go something like this: The world’s tallest building will be strapped to a mobile space rock, and residents can come and go as they please so long as they parachute down to earth.

Are you sold?

Rendering of Analemma being constructed

This is the vision of New York-based Clouds Architecture Office, which has proposed a conceptual tower suspended from an orbiting asteroid, Dezeen reported. The hypothetical project, dubbed Analemma Tower, would be attached to a NASA-controlled asteroid. The asteroid would trace a figure eight path between the northern and southern hemispheres each day, spending the longest part of its orbit over Midtown Manhattan.

Analemma isn’t the firm’s first hypothetical voyage into space. Clouds won a competition hosted by NASA in 2015 to design a 3D printed home for Mars.

The conceptual tower joins other recent outlandish designs that reimagine how height is represented in the city. Earlier this month Oiio proposed what it billed as the world’s longest tower, which looks like two conjoined 432 Park Avenues.

No word yet on how Analemma will deal with tenant motion sickness. [Dezeen] — Kathryn Brenzel

314 S. Harvard Boulevard and 831 N. Martel Avenue

Remember, size isn’t everything. In TRD’s regular look at microfilings, we explore some of the smaller L.A. projects in the works.

Logs Apartments, an Irvine-based developer, filed plans for a 36-unit apartment building at 16101 S. Figueroa Street in South L.A., records show. The firm requested a density bonus in exchange for including three very low-income units.

The structure would have a maximum height of 45 feet with four stories and include an additional 45-foot parking structure with 76 parking spots.

Logs acquired the 0.4-acre Gateway Harbor site for just short of $1 million in March 2016, property records show.

In Koreatown, developer Warren Choi wants to build a 11-unit condo complex on a 0.2-acre lot he bought for $1.1 million in February 2016, records show. The project, at 314 N. Harvard Boulevard, would have four stories and 23 parking spaces.

The site is currently occupied by a 1901-built single-family home.

A small condo complex could also rise in Fairfax, right on the edge of West Hollywood. Wilshire Construction filed plans Tuesday to build a three-story, five-unit condo structure at 829 N. Martel Avenue, according to planning documents.

The site is currently occupied by a two-family house. The owner, Martel LLC, purchased the site for $1.35 million in September 2016.

Tom Gores and the Beverly Park property

Tom Gores’s former Beverly Park pad is back on the market, just five months after the Detroit Pistons owner sold it for a record-breaking $40 million, The Real Deal has learned.

The developers who bought it — Gala Asher and Ed Berman — relisted it Wednesday for $49 million. If it trades for that price, it would replace their purchase of the mansion as the priciest sale in Beverly Park history.

Listing broker Ginger Glass of Coldwell Banker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 24,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion at 78 Beverly Park Lane has been completely redone and sits on manicured grounds, the listing shows.

Last year, Gores, the billionaire chairman of private equity firm Platinum Equity, traded a number of his properties, including the Beverly Park property, for a $100 million Holmby Hills mega-mansion built by Asher. That spec home is located on former site of Barbara Streisand’s Mon Rêve property and includes a private hiking trail.

Gore’s former home just the latest to come on the market in Beverly Park.

A Colonial mansion with ties to Russia’s former minister of communications recently hit the market for $29 million. A sale is also pending on a $30 million Beverly Park property owned by the ex-wife of Bambang Trihatmodjo, son of Indonesian dictator Suharto.

Rendering of Oceanwide Plaza at 1101 S. Flower Street and Mark Company president Alan Mark

The Mark Company has been tapped to list and sell the entirety of the 504-unit Oceanwide Plaza condo complex, the marketing firm announced Thursday.

Expected to open in 2019, the Oceanwide Plaza development will have three mixed-use towers containing condo units, a 184-key Park Hyatt hotel and 166,000 square feet of retail.

The Mark Company, a subsidiary of Pacific Union International, is also selling units in the Cavalleri development in Malibu’s Point Dume.

Developed by Beijing firm Oceanwide Holdings Company, the project across the street from the Staples Center is led by Thomas Feng, who tapped Kennedy Wilson last year to lease its retail component..

“Oceanwide Plaza is the first [North American] project for Oceanwide Holdings, so it needs to be successful and it needs to set the bar,” Feng told The Real Deal. “The first step we took was partnering with local experts that really know the market. We didn’t come here thinking we knew it all.”

Santa Monica apartment building after 1994 Northridge earthquake (Getty Images)

Commercial and multifamily building owners in Santa Monica will soon be among the nation’s most earthquake-ready landlords.

Santa Monica City Council approved a seismic retrofitting plan Tuesday that will require safety improvements to as many as 2,000 buildings suspected of being vulnerable during an earthquake.

Owners of buildings suspected of being at risk will start receiving notices in May, the Los Angeles Times reported. The notices will be mailed out over the course of a year. Single-family homes are not included in the plan.

City officials estimate the cost of retrofitting a typical wood apartment building to be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit and $50 to $100 a square foot for concrete and steel buildings.

City officials outlined 200 brick buildings that would need to be retrofitted within two years. There are 30 concrete tilt-ups — where concrete panels are tilted into place to form the walls of a building — that would have to be seismically strengthened within three years.

Wood apartments with flimsy ground floors, known as “soft story buildings,” will have up to six years to retrofit, according to the L.A. Times. There are an estimated 1,700 soft story buildings in Santa Monica.

Roughly 70 suspected brittle concrete buildings will have a decade to complete a retrofit, while an estimated 80 steel-frame buildings will have two decades, according to the Times.

Los Angeles passed its own earthquake retrofit ordinance in 2015 requiring nearly 15,000 wood apartments and concrete buildings to be retrofitted, but Santa Monica has enacted the most expansive regulations in the country by adding steel-frame buildings to its list. [LAT] — Subrina Hudson

Single family homes in the U.S. (Credit: Rachel Elaine via Flickr)

From the New York website: The number of pending U.S. home sales reached a 10-month high in February, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The index, which tracks contract signings on previously owned homes, jumped 5.5 percent in February to reach 112.3, the Wall Street Journal reported. That’s the highest level since April 2016 and the second-highest level since May 2006, according to the newspaper.

Warmer weather and gains on the stock market could be causing the stronger sales, Lawrence Yun, the NAR chief economist said, according to the Journal. The expectation the Federal Reserve will continue to lift interest rates this year may also have encouraged people to buy homes, Yun said.

Earlier this month, the central bank raised rates for the third time since the late-2000s financial crisis.  Officials also indicated they will raise interest rates at least twice more this year. [WSJ] — Miriam Hall

From left: Tom Barrack and former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (Credit: Getty)

Construction is underway on a 77,000-square-foot Bel Air mansion attached to billionaire Trump chum Thomas Barrack Jr., who filed plans for the project in 2014. But the Colony Capital CEO is not building it for himself, sources told The Real Deal.

The major investor behind the Peter Marino-designed project is the Al Thani royal family of Qatar, the sources said.

“Barrack is just the frontman,” said a source familiar with the project. “It’s got to cost at least $100 million, probably more.”

The site — which spans eight acres of land right above the Bel Air Country Club at 11101 Chalon Road — was purchased in 2010 for $35 million, property records show. It’s unclear who owns the land. A representative of Barrack Jr. could not be reached for comment.

Barrack Jr. has deep ties with investors in the Middle East, including the Al Thani family. In 2011, Barrack Jr. worked with the Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund overseen by the royal family, to purchase Miramax Films and some of its assets for $660 million.

In 2015, the Arabic-speaking billionaire intervened on behalf of the family in a dispute over the ownership of the Claridge’s Hotel in London. In a bidding war with Daily Telegraph owners David and Frederick Barclay, Barrack swooped in to purchase $82 million of debt on the property, which Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the former emir of Qatar, acquired with his son, Jassim bin Hamad, for $2.4 billion.

The Al Thanis are no strangers to L.A. Another one of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani’s sons (he has 24 children with three wives) made headlines when he was filmed drag racing his bright yellow Ferrari in the streets of Beverly Hills. He subsequently fled the country, telling the police that he has diplomatic immunity.