When Meyer Orbach & Josh Gotlib went on an epic Manhattan buying binge right after Covid, people wondered what the endgame was. The duo had dropped $2B+ on a 2K+ unit portfolio of tony rentals and capitalized the hell out of them - pref flowed in from the likes of RXR, the Qataris and the Children’s Investment Fund. Now, the principals are looking to get out from under that pesky pref and cash out via a 5-building IPO - the US markets don’t really entertain that kind of thing, so Orbach & Gotlib are dialing 416. 🍁

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Their JV, GO Partners, filed a preliminary prospectus on the TSX, touting the IPO of GO Residential REIT as an “opportunity to invest in luxury high-rise multifamily properties” in NYC and other prime markets. It bills the total value of the current properties at $2.74B, though it’s unclear how they got there - Canadian financial disclosures are a lil’ more improvisational than ours.

Wasn’t enough time to do something rigorous by this ed., but I pinged friend of The Promote and REIT wonk Hunter to get his quick-n-dirty take. His comments mixed in w/ mine👇

The portfolio (h/t Bisnow) spans 2,015 apartments spanning 1.8M+ sf, and claims avg. occupancy of 98.6% & avg. rents of $6,500 (It claims psf rents of $87, but is that gross or net? 🤷 ). It includes the 761-unit American Copper Buildings, which the partners bought from Michael Stern’s JDS for $837M in ‘22, and 4 buildings purchased from the late Sheldon Solow’s son Stefan Soloviev reportedly for $1.2B, or $1M/ 🚪 .

Also notable: Floyd Mayweather’s Vada, which supposedly made a $100M equity investment in the portfolio, is nowhere to be found in the prospectus 🥊

“Two guys in a pickup truck and 100,000 GPUs – what could go wrong?” 🛻
“The other guys are new to the street. You asked me what could go wrong with these real estate guys? They're late. They're just late.” ⌛
“No one can sit here with a straight face and tell you they're future-proofing data centers. That just doesn't exist.” 🖖

The kind of “how the sausage is made” conversation you just won’t find anywhere else (seriously, go try): This week, Marc Ganzi, a data center pioneer and CEO of DigitalBridge, walks us through 2 defining deals in the space: the $11B take-private of Switch, and CoreWeave's "metaphorical lockbox" $7.5B funding, one of the largest-ever private debt financings. We asked Marc to hit us w/ insider deets (securitization wrappers, lease breakdowns) and he more than obliged. Spotify here, Apple here, and YouTube here. For advertising, here. Please rate us & write a review if you dig it - we’re a Top 100 Business pod on Apple, and fancy cracking the Top 50 next. Shout-out to our sponsor for this episode, MADDPROJECT – get deets on their NYC resi development fund by hitting Antonia up.

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is now the front-runner to be the next mayor of the world’s temple of capitalism. It’s an astonishing rise for a 33 YO who ran on an unabashedly populist mandate – basically, give people free stuff – and explicitly positioned himself as a guardian against Big Real Estate. (We’ll leave the broader political postgame to those more qualified and focus on the CRE implications here.) Mamdani’s undeniably impressive campaign overcame the legacy name and big dollars showered on heavy favorite Andrew Cuomo, who, despite having been the governor who signed the market-shellacking ‘19 rent reforms, was real estate’s favored candidate and showered w/ cash by the industry’s biggest players. (In March, Cuomo expressed regret about how far the rent laws had gone in a closed-door chat w/ REBNY leadership)

In his primary victory speech last night, Mamdani doubled down on his promise to freeze the rent 🥶 on the city’s 1M rent-stabilized units, saying that he would push for a city “where rent-stabilized apartments are actually stabilized.” (We should say that the NYC mayor has no direct authority to do this, but can stack the RGB w/ people who could help make it happen; industry lobbyist Jay Martin described a rent freeze as “medicine applied to the wrong wound.”) There’s going to be SO much more to say as the business community (and rando Ackman acolytes) digests this stunning upset – the likes of John Catsimatidis 🍗 have warned of capital flight. One big Q on our mind: Is Mamdani’s victory a lifeline for current mayor (and now Democractic pariah) Eric Adams?

Summer is here, but it is definitively springtime 🌸 in the agency-lending world. Prominent players who plied their trade through Fannie & Freddie had spent a year-plus on the bench as the agencies investigated concerns of mortgage fraud. Now, a handful of them are being cleared for business. The latest: Big 5 appraisal firm BBG, which had been under Freddie review since last May, (see agency memo here) is back in good standing: We had heard chatter of this late last week, but were told that BBG had explicitly been told by the agency to stay mum about the reprieve 🙊; TRD was then able to confirm via comms sent to agency lenders. When BBG was placed under review, its former key appraiser Jon DiPietra was placed on the agency’s restricted vendor list (BAD). DiPietra was pushed out last summer (he’s now at Horvath & Tremblay), and in his wake BBG replaced its top leadership. The news follows similar good tidings for Madison Title, which fêted its own Fannie freedom last week, and Meridian Capital Group, which was released (w/ caveats) by Freddie in Jan. and just announced its comeback deal, a $173M Manhattan refi for 🐐 Ruby Schron. We’re still waiting on updates from some of the other players on ⏸ , notably Eastern Union & Sevenstone.

The cottage industry of green certifiers that made their living off HUD may need to spruce up their LinkedIn profiles ( 🪦 blower tests): HUD Sec Scott Turner confirmed chatter from March that the agency’s “Green” Mortgage Insurance Premium program would be eliminated, and that the FHA will move to set all Mortgage Insurance Premiums to 25 bps. “For too long, access to housing has been tied to obsolete, ideological mandates,” Turner said. HUD lenders are celebrating the change, which makes them more able to go toe-to-toe w/ Fannie & Freddie. The word in March was that MIPs on new construction (usually 65 bps) & refis (60bps) would be reduced to 35bps, so this scenario is even better than hoped.