By Al Barbarino 2/11 1:39pm

Lease Beat

608 Fifth Avenue

Vornado Scoops Ground Lease at Art Deco Gem Swiss Center

Vornado Realty Trust has reportedly taken control of the ground lease at the landmarked 11-story Swiss Center at 608 Fifth Avenue, where the REIT is marketing 44,440 square feet of retail space across four of its floors.

Vornado took over RFR Realty’s mortgage on the property last March with an $8.5 million payment that RFR owed to another lender and signed the ground lease on the property with the family of the late Sarah Korein, which owns the land under the building, according to the New York Post. Read More

By Carl Gaines 7/17/12 7:15am

The Sit-Down

Eric Gelber.

Eric Gelber, CBRE’s Retail Running Man, on Racing and Leasing Endurance

Brokerage can feel like a marathon at times—not only is it necessary to draw on stamina and patience, but being prepared doesn’t hurt either. So if all goes according to plan, Eric Gelber should be drawing on equal quantities of all of these by the time this issue of The Commercial Observer is circulating the halls of CBRE, where he’s a senior vice president in the Retail Services Group. Mr. Gelber is slated to run 135 miles in the Badwater Ultramarathon—starting in Death Valley and going up into the foothills of Mount Whitney, Calif., the following day. While the temperature in New York this Tuesday looks like it will be in the low 70s, Mr. Gelber will be facing heat that could top out at 130 degrees. He’ll be running to raise money for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, in memory of a family friend who died from the disease. The Commercial Observer caught up with Mr. Gelber—who was nursing a sore ankle, no less—the day before he left to fly out West, to talk about his work at CBRE and the grueling race ahead. Read More