Super Bowl Sunday Summary: Touchdowns and Extra Points
By The Editors February 8, 2026 9:00 am
reprints
Today is that all-American experience: Super Bowl Sunday. It is a day for face painting. Buffalo wings. And celebrity commercials (even if they sometimes spark legal backlash).
But in the end football is about yardage — and running up the score. That’s something this savage sport shares with real estate. Last week real estate players weren’t bothered by the cold. They had their game faces on. And they were making big plays.
In Manhattan, Jamie Dimon is not satisfied with a 2.5 million-square-foot skyscraper smack in the middle of Midtown: J.P. Morgan Chase scooped up another 139,332 yards — er, square feet — at Brookfield Properties’ Five Manhattan West, bringing the banking giant’s footprint at the property to roughly 565,000 square feet.
Likewise, Burlington Stores is going for the extra points, having renewed its office at Empire State Realty Trust’s 1400 Broadway and added an additional 35,629 square feet, bringing its total square footage up to 206,392 square feet.
In Miami, L&L Holding and Oak Row Equities scored a $335 million floating-rate bridge loan from Blue Owl Capital to refinance Wynwood Plaza (which can claim Amazon as a tenant).
Tight ends are one thing on the football field, but tight cap rates are another thing entirely in real estate and, if Wheelock Street Capital and Brand Atlantic sell Banyan & Olive in West Palm Beach at the asking price of around $200 million, it will translate into the tightest cap rate for an office in the Southeast U.S.
Finally, Gencom is tackling the 253-key Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park at 50 Central Park South from Westbrook Partners for an unknown amount.
Player trades
We saw some interesting personnel moves last week.
Ray Anderson was appointed CEO of Cresa, taking the seat of CRE legend Tod Lickerman (who will stay on Cresa’s board).
Peter Michailidis, is making the move from JLL to CBRE.
And, in its earnings calls last week, Brookfield Asset Management announced that Connor Teskey was being promoted to CEO, replacing Bruce Flatt. (While we’re on the topic of Brookfield, did we mention they purchased California-based industrial REIT Peakstone Realty Trust for $1.2 billion — or $21 per share?)
Fourth-quarter plays
Speaking of Brookfield’s earnings, it should be noted we’re well into earnings season and we saw some interesting things on the instant replays.
Did you know that KKR raised $28 billion of new capital last quarter ($129 billion for all of 2025) and its assets under management sit at $744 billion? (KKR deployed some of that capital last week to refinance World Wide Group and Rabina’s 421-unit project in Long Island City, Queens, called QLIC, to the tune of $160.2 million.)
We learned that the Southern California industrial giant Rexford Industrial Realty is pivoting away from the buying sprees that characterized the last year into “recycling capital,” and focusing on occupancy and cash-flow.
In multifamily, we found out that AvalonBay (which can claim 98,694 apartments in 11 states) boasted that its funds from operations was up 2.4 percent for all of 2025, to more than $1.6 billion; and Equity Residential reported an enviable 96.4 percent occupancy in its sprawling national portfolio.
Retail has also come to play, with Indiana-based Simon Property Group scoring $1.328 billion in real estate funds from operations in the fourth quarter — a 4.2 percent increase from $1.261 billion a year ago. (Hey, Simon is not the only one. We see the retail turnaround in SoHo.)
The losing teams
Of course, every victorious team has its losing counterpart. And, yes, there were players who decidedly did not walk away last week a winner.
On Friday, we saw the January jobs numbers, and they were not good. According to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, job openings fell to their lowest number since 2020, and the number of layoffs in January was the most for that month since 2009!
Workers on the Gateway Tunnel also didn’t look quite so invulnerable when a spat between President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer led to the withholding of federal funds from the U.S. Department of Transportation for the project to replace the Amtrak tunnels beneath the Hudson River.
The owners of 175 West Jackson Boulevard, the 22-story, 1.4 million-square-foot office building in Downtown Chicago, took it on the chin when a joint venture between 601W Companies and David Werner Real Estate Investments secured $58.5 million — which is an 87 percent discount from the $306 million the owners paid for it in 2018.
And, while Connor Teskey and Ray Anderson could certainly be happy getting elevated to the CEO chair, over at JLL a top chair was expeditiously vacated. Only three weeks after Michael Colacino was elevated to the role of CEO of the firm’s leasing advisory business for the Americas, he stepped down… and we’re not sure why.
Halftime show reading
Of course, football is one thing Europeans will never quite get about Americans. (We suspect those who are tuning in are there to see Bad Bunny.)
The real question is: What are foreign investors looking for in American CRE?
“In terms of capital flows to Sun Belt apartments, you still see plenty of investors willing to look through that near-term softness because the Sun Belt will grow its way out of this oversupply problem,” said Joshua Scoville, head of global research at Hines. “The Sun Belt is going to burn through that supply situation, and I think that evidence will start to be pretty apparent by the end of 2026, and then 2027-2028, when we have very little new deliveries, you’ll start to see those fundamentals move in a pretty strong direction to the positive.”
Honestly, we’re happy they’re looking. Some are worried that American political warfare might be scaring off foreign investment.
“Without naming names, U.S. policy has disturbed a lot of global investors who had always viewed the U.S. as rock-solid and safe,” said David Hodes, founder and co-managing partner of Hodes Weill & Associates.
Others are more sanguine, like Rob Speyer, who sat down with CO recently and wasn’t worried that capital might be avoiding the U.S.A.
“It’s not showing up in the numbers,” Speyer said. “New York today is the most in-demand city from our global investor base. We’re a global company. So, we’re in the U.S., Europe and Asia and broadly across most global capital cities. And New York’s position relative to the competition is stronger than it was a decade ago. And I would say that is true broadly about our country. It’s dangerous to bet against America as an investor.”
Well, that’s comforting. Now, let’s see if the Seahawks can beat the spread.
[Deputy Editor Tom Acitelli: Go Pats!] [Copy Editor Skip Card: Ignore that. Go Seahawks.] [Editor-in-Chief Max Gross: When do pitchers and catchers report?]See you next week!
