Developer Adam Gordon made his fortune converting old properties into self-storage units.

Now he’s going back to his roots in a move to capitalize on the boom in luxury property prices.

The Real Deal reports that Gordon plans to convert an existing 11-story storage building at 305 East 61st Street into a high-end personal and art storage facility tailored to Upper East Side residents in luxury buildings like 432 Park Avenue and One57, and to art galleries on the 57th Street corridor.

The ...

The Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking district could sell for more than $400 million, or around $1.2 million per room — the highest price for a hotel since the financial crisis struck in 2008.

A group led by Steve Kantor is in talks, along with other bidders, to buy the 18-story hotel.

The hotel was developed and managed by hotelier Andre Balazs’s company. Balazs sold his majority stake in the Standard Hotel brand last year, putting the property on the market.

Dune Real ...

New York
December was a robust month for office leasing in Manhattan, with high-profile deals signed in all three major markets of Midtown, Midtown South and Downtown.
As of Dec. 27, a total of 9.1 million square feet of office space was leased in Manhattan in 2013’s fourth quarter, according to data from commercial brokerage Colliers International. That’s up sharply from 6.31 million square feet in the previous quarter and 4.97 million square feet in 2012’s fourth quarter. Colliers chief ...

Increased availability of debt and an uptick in office rents drove demand for large Manhattan office towers in 2013. The top 10 priciest building sales of the year included nine office buildings — a threefold increase over the three office towers that cracked the top 10 list in 2012.
Those sales were driven in part by the recovery of the Manhattan office leasing market, which rebounded in 2013 after a 2012 drop-off. Last year at this time major office tenants ...

The inventory crunch shows little sign of letting up. In the fourth quarter of 2013, inventory dropped to 4,164 co-op and condominium units, a 12.3% dip from the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Miller Samuel. That’s the lowest inventory level since the firm began tracking the data in 2000. The drop was even more pronounced for new development units, whose availability fell 19.6 percent year-over-year. The situation, however, was much better on the luxury end of the market — ...