On Wednesday, Promote Insiders got the 1st installment of Shallow Bay Chalamet, our collab w/ CompStak crunching the most significant deals and numbers in the hot-hot-hot shallow-bay industrial space. If this sounds like your jam, you can sign up for premium on a 2 week free trial and read it here.

We’ve got a tasty ed. today: Aby Rosen shows why despite the Manhattan market being increasingly crowded w/ risk-adjusted returns types, there’s only one Aby Rosen. Goodwin Gaw taps out of 🇺🇸 , and Blackstone has a new vehicle to gobble AUM in perpetuity. And both the girthy Chetrit titans have now been hit w/ criminal indictments – are there precedents for this in NYC? Let’s get to it.

Aby Rosen has a message for you: He’s had his triumphs, and he’s had his disasters, and both have played out on the world’s most famous skyline. When all’s said and done, though, he’s still Aby Rosen, and he’s likely a lot richer & cooler than you.

“Am I worth a lot less? I promise you I am,” Rosen said of his last 18 months, in which his RFR has sold $2B worth of properties – he pointedly called them “inventory” to emphasize the emotional detachment needed to survive in the CRE game. “Nobody should feel bad for Aby Rosen,” he added, in an extremely entertaining and wide-ranging sit-down w/ CO. Some highlights:

Explosive allegations of mortgage fraud that have caught up 2 prominent regional banks, Zions and Western Alliance. The drama once again highlights how vital regional banks are to the industry’s capital markets – and how distress in that space can ruin the whole party. Next, we look at Walmart’s intriguing new mall playbook. And finally, there’s a LITERAL crackdown (allegedly) happening at one of the country’s most notable supertalls, Harry Macklowe and CIM Group's 432 Park Avenue - what are you willing to sacrifice for an “absolutely pure” building?

Listen on Spotify here, YouTube here or Apple Podcasts here. Brands: To get in front of our obsessed audience of CRE insiders, reach out here.

And here we go: Joseph Chetrit, one of the preeminent merchant princes of big-ticket real estate, is now facing felony charges of tenant harassment, weeks after his brother Meyer and their eponymous firm were charged. The Manhattan DA alleges that the Chetrits deliberately left 2 sr. tenants sans heat and sans elevator, in an attempt to get them to vacate their rent-stabilized digs. The felony charge carries a max of 4Y in the slammer. DA Bragg sees the extraordinary escalation – historically, tenant harassment came w/ civil actions – as a way to warn landlords against any hanky-panky. “Our hope is that the industry would be supportive of this kind of alleged conduct being rooted out,” Bragg told TRD last month. On Thursday, he announced a new bill that would seek to further up the ante, creating a new Class D felony charge, aggravated harassment of a rent-regulated tenant, that carries a max sentence of 7Y.

How rare is it for a New York landlord to actually see prison time over harassment-related charges? Extraordinarily rare. The Promote dug through news clippings to see if it’s happened; for the most part, those that have been put away have gone down for a related financial crime, rather than the harassment itself – w/ one 🔥 exception (note: this is not a scientific list, don’t @ us)

Gaw Capital, controlled by Hong Kong property tycoon Goodwin Gaw, is done w/ the West. The firm is pulling out of the US & European markets, per PERE, and will refocus its efforts on Asia. We’re not really tracking its European deals, but Gaw’s American adventure, which started just after the GFC, has gone badly: Splashy acquisitions like Hollywood & Highland, which Gaw & DJM Capital bought from CIM Group & ADIA for $320M in ‘19 (nearly $700 / 🦶 ), have been disasters. “If you buy right, and you have the right concept for buildings, they turn around pretty quickly,” Goodwin said of his strategy back then. But the struggling LA retail market (for areas not called Beverly Hills) can unravel the best-laid plans. 👋 🌊

The lineup at Marcus & Millichap’s Texas multi forum Thursday had us flummoxed. Why would Blackstone send 2 heavyweights – BREIT COO Glen Bartley & newly tapped COO of Defined Contribution Paul Quinlan – to a conference of mostly middleweights? But it started to make more sense when Bartley dropped some big news on stage: On 10/31 at 10:31 a.m. (Get it?), he said, BREIT would be announcing the launch of its first 1031 Delaware Statutory Trust, targeting Sunbelt multifamily.

“We’ve been through up cycles, we’ve been through down cycles, and now we feel like we’re really turning the corner and entering a new growth cycle,” Bartley said. “We’re not the first to do it by any means,” he added, but “want to do it in a very scalable way.” BREIT has massive exposure in market-rate multi, which accounts for 20% of its holdings; the 🦁 ‘s share of that $12B action is in the Sunbelt. Here’s how it’ll work, per the BX execs: A 1031 investor invests into the DST, at which point their money’s locked up for 2Y. At the end of that period, BREIT has the right – but not the obligation – to UPREIT properties into the fund in exchange for Operating Partnership (OP) units. Quite the AUM gobbling ™ vehicle for our age.

DSTs have typically been marketed through retail-focused channels such as wirehouses, RIAs and broker-dealers, Bartley noted; BX is aiming to add I-sales brokers to the mix. But there’s historically been a reason for that retail focus. As REIT expert Jonathan Morris put it to me: “Sophisticated investors would never put their money into these programs under nearly any circumstances; they’d find another property to acquire for their own 1031 exchange.” Insiders, read on👇