As we wrote to Promote Insiders on Wednesday, “the 🧃 nowadays is in the restructuring, rather than in the buying/selling.” Taking deed is cool, setting up your machan somewhere in the capstack is cooler 😎 . The latest example comes to us from Tribeca’s 15 Laight St., where Hyundai Motor Group is in advanced talks to bring in SL Green as a partner, The Promote understands.

The Korean automotive giant bought the then-new boutique office from Vanbarton in ‘23, paying a cartoonishly high $275M (≈ $2,500/ 🦶 ) in an all-cash deal – as we like to say, always try to find the 1/1 buyer. But it soon had engine trouble.👇

Who's been sued by an investor before? Anybody brought property management in-house? Got a lender still quoting in this market? And how do you handle the immense pressure of building while raising young kids? Cohorts is a private, vetted peer group of GPs trading live Rolodexes — vendors, brokers, experiences — as well as a support network of trusted operators going through the same challenges as you. Check out the community at joincohorts.com to get started. $10M AUM minimum.

Zohran Mamdani, Arsenal fan and professional billionaire agitator who also happens to be mayor of New York City, is now kicking the third rail of the real estate industry, a pied-à-terre tax. Hard to overstate just how universally loathed this levy is by the developer and broker set; what follows is a brief history 👇

• ‘14: Introduced by State. Sen. Brad Hoylman. This is when the NY senate was hard Republican, the infamous "3 men in a room" era of govt. The bill got killed, and then killed another dozen times
• Rough structure: • $5-6MM homes would be hit w/ a 0.5% tax• $25M+ homes would be charged $370K + 4% on value above $25M • One estimate pegged the move would boost state coffers by ≈ $700M
• Here's all-powerful REBNY prez at the time, Stevie Spinola: “The problem is that when you propose this kind of economic hit on any segment of the market, you’re putting a significant 🥶 into the market.”
• ‘17: Mayoral hopeful Sal Albanese comes off the top rope w/ a renewed call for the tax, positioning himself against BDB, who he calls a tool of Big Real Estate
• ‘19: Edgy hedgie KG’s $238M purchase of a pad at 220 CPS * sparks an intense conversation about wealth inequality and some of the most vigorous calls for the tax. "The Rich Didn't Always Need $238M Penthouses," says the Times. Vornado overlord Steve Roth, who developed the building, responds that “those who fan the fire of class warfare and those who tear down should be put on double secret probation.”
• The Brothers Zeckendorf, developers of some of NYC's "It"tiest buildings, head to Albany to plead their case against the tax. REBNY puts out a “fact sheet” to lawmakers that estimates the PAT tax would bring in just $370M a year, well under initial estimates (REBNY’s figures are compiled by an economist on the Zeckendorf payroll). Good chart here on the stakes for developers. By March ‘19, Cuomo puts the industry at ease: PAT tax is OFF the table.
• Present day: “Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich,” Mamdani says in a now mega-viral video. This time, Council Speaker Julie Menin (seen by the industry as a counterweight to Mamdani’s more radical policies) is on his side, describing the PAT tax as a “smart, sensible proposal," and indicating that she’d support local legislation to impose it. State Sen. Michael Gianaris says “it’ll fly pretty easily.” It’s being tucked into the state budget (Mamdani has lots of juice with Gov. Hochul) rather than as a standalone bill, so it's going to be harder for the industry to fend off.

Here’s the most surprising bit, a line from Hochul that sounds right out of the Zohran phrasebook: “There are literally Russian oligarchs buying up properties, driving up the property values. They’re all welcome to stay, but I think there’s a logic behind them also contributing to the city.” Fun times ahead! ☭

*If you don’t know the astonishing deal history of 220, watch the short doc we co-produced here

On Thursday, April 23, The Promote will be hosting an in-depth chat w/ Lightstone Group founder David Lichtenstein, a proper dealmaker x asset classes. We’ll talk retail money, development, special sits, & a lot more – David is really in the mix. This virtual event is only for subscribers to The Promote Insider, so sign up for that and we’ll send you registration deets.

This week on the pod, we break routine to bring you a no-holds-barred interview with the Sunbelt multifamily syndicator boom/bust’s poster child, GVA’s Alan Stalcup. Fueled by OPM and ZIRP, Stalcup amassed 30,000 units in an acquisition spree for the ages. When rates turned, however, GVA got hit by a wave of defaults, lawsuits, and explosive allegations of fraud. Hiten did a spicy Q/A w/ Stalcup in Jan. on “the fall”, but here we wanted to get into detail on “the rise” – how did a nonentity become one of the largest apt. owners in the country in a matter of 2Y?

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Listen on Spotify here, YouTube here or Apple Podcasts here. Brands: To get some play at CRE’s ultimate water cooler, reach out here.

PS: Stalcup is now helping his GVA cubs raise for a new evergreen fund 🤷

One of the foremost AUM Gobblers ™ is getting into one of the fastest-growing & most zeitgeisty corners of CRE finance. Ares, through its alts credit group (Keith Ashton, Joel Holsinger, Kevin Alexander), is backing Clearwater PACE w/ up to $300M.

Clearwater, run by Jonathan Seabolt, is a subsidiary of CRE financier AXCS, which in turn is backed by Mike Simanovsky’s Conversant Capital (Conversant last featured in these pages during our deep dive into the era-defining SF hotel deal.) Clearwater will use the facility to make balance-sheet C-PACE loans x the capstack, from ground-up deals & redevs to post-construction recaps. The Ares stash will cover $40-50M checks. (The way such facilities typically work is that the warehouse lender will want a certain hurdle 🚧🏃 return, after which the C-PACE lender pockets any resids.)

The PACE structure was germinated in the early 00s, and implemented by the city of Berkeley in ‘08 as a mechanism to allow homeowners to finance solar systems through long-term property-tax assessments. A commercial program followed the year after, though it remained a backwater in CRE finance until a couple years ago, when deal volumes skyrocketed – out of the ≈$10B in C-PACE (trade group stats) put out from ‘09-24, nearly half of that was in ‘23 & ‘24, and ‘25 was estimated to be the program’s biggest-ever year. C-PACE lenders are biting off fatter & fatter chunks of the capstack, w/ records being broken on the regular – the current one is Nuveen Green Capital’s $465M for the Post Bros. massive office-resi job in DC.