Harry Macklowe's $6.4 Billion Bill Debt

[acmavm]

<snip>

IN August 2003, Harry B. Macklowe raced from lender to lender to round up a record-breaking $1.4 billion to buy the General Motors Building, the 50-story commercial skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan that is one of New York’s trophy properties.

Then 66, he gambled mightily to outmaneuver rival bidders and to vault back into the top ranks of New York developers. He went so far as to put down a nonrefundable $50 million deposit and sell many of his residential buildings to raise cash. Some bankers and real estate executives scoffed at the deal, privately suggesting that Mr. Macklowe had overpaid and would drown in an undertow of debt.

Not for the first time, Mr. Macklowe, an acknowledged master of winner-take-all real estate poker, proved his skeptics wrong. He expanded and enhanced the valuable retail space of the G.M. Building — on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street — by creating a glass cube for an Apple store that has become a popular tourist destination. As the market soared, Macklowe Properties refinanced the tower twice, most recently in a deal that values it at about $2.7 billion.

But these days Mr. Macklowe is scrambling for financing yet again. He has a $6.4 billion debt payment coming due next month in connection with his purchase of seven other Midtown Manhattan office buildings a year ago. When he bought those buildings from Equity Office Properties, he more than doubled the size of his real estate portfolio and used only $50 million of his own money to do so; he borrowed $7 billion to finance the rest of the purchase.

<snip>

THE Macklowes aren’t the only real estate barons in a tight spot. The Kushner Companies, also family owned, plunged into the Manhattan real estate market in 2006, paying $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, at 53rd Street. The cash flow from 666 Fifth represents only about two-thirds of the amount needed to service the debt on the building — a shortfall of about $5 million a month — according to Real Capital Analytics, a research company in New York.

In Los Angeles, the developer Robert F. Maguire III may be forced to sell his publicly traded company, Maguire Properties, after buying a portfolio of buildings from the Blackstone Group just before the subprime credit crisis sent many of his tenants into bankruptcy. An Australian company, the Centro Properties Group, is putting itself up for sale after failing to refinance billions of dollars of short-term debt stemming in part from its acquisition of an American shopping center company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/business/06harry.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

-MORE-

Everybody wants to be a mega billionaire. Can't settle for rich and comfortable, they gotta be Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.


edit: forgot link

[flashl]

1. Commerical real estate is predicted as the next group to fall. n/t

[sendero]

2. It's going to be so fun..

...watching all these houses of cards fall, The idiot buyers, rolling the dice with Other People's Money, and the OP as well, watching their (subprime) loans become non-performing.

The country has become a nation of poker players, and it looks like everyone missed their flush draw at once :)