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☆ A tale of 2 tech giants: Struggling Meta is pulling back on offices in LA and NYC to cut costs, while TikTok is expanding
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-02 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

TikTok is seeking 150,000 square feet in Los Angeles to more than double its footprint in the city. One of the leasing executives who spoke with Insider said TikTok had considered spaces from "Santa Monica to downtown" Los Angeles. Meta, meanwhile, has 260,000 square feet in Los Angeles at the Brickyard, a recently built office complex in Playa Vista. The diverging appetite for office space between TikTok and Meta underscores a change in fortune for both firms. A spokeswoman for Meta said the company would not comment on its LA offices or its plans for them.

☆ The SEC is suing real-estate mogul Kent Swig's shady crypto partner for perpetuating a 'pump-and-dump' scheme with a different gold-backed crypto currency
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-01 | by ( Alex Nicoll | Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Now the SEC is suing the CEO of Swig's company for an earlier, separate gold-backed crypto scam. According to the SEC, Braverman was said to be the chief operating officer of one of two companies the regulator targeted in the complaint. When Swig's company announced Digau, cryptocurrencies were on a sugar high, with bitcoin trading above $60,000. Neither Swig nor Dignity Gold would reveal to Business Insider any of the specific site locations where the company plans to mine. To extract the gold, Swig partnered with a mining company called Apache Mill Tailings.

In 2017, Insider highlighted its first crop of rising stars on Wall Street. of rising stars on Wall Street. Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest stories in hedge funds, PE, fintech, and banking — delivered daily to your inbox. For the last five years, Insider has been highlighting some of the best and brightest on Wall Street. Here's what 13 Wall Street rising stars are up to five years on.

☆ Meet 30 rising stars of real estate who are transforming the way homes are sold and offices get built at firms like Blackstone, Redfin, and CBRE
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-29 | by ( Robert Davis | Dan Latu | Jordan Pandy | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Meet Insider's third-annual slate of emerging talent in commercial and residential real estate. We selected 30 young professionals 35 and under whose leadership spans a vast industry. Insider has tried to capture the brightest of the bunch in our third-annual Rising Stars of Real Estate list. But real estate isn't all about making money. Presented in alphabetical order by last name, here are the rising stars of real estate for 2022.

☆ KKR is canceling its plans for a big new Manhattan office. It joins Meta, Netflix, and other big firms pulling back on office space.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-22 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Two senior leasing executives in Los Angeles told Insider that Meta just canceled its plans to expand by 300,000 square feet in the city. KKR's decision comes as New York City's office market flagsTenants who are on the fence about taking space have little incentive to rush to commit to deals as the city's office market continues to soften. Leasing activity in Manhattan totaled 20.27 million square feet through October, according to CBRE, 38% more than the same period last year. Leasing is on track to finish the year well below prepandemic activity in 2018 and 2019, when 32.4 million and 31.6 million square feet were leased respectively in total. Cushman & Wakefield data showed there was over 21 million square feet of sublease space available in Manhattan in September.

☆ One of Wall Street's toughest shops isn't for the faint of heart. But the rewards are plenty for those who make it to the top.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Dan Defrancesco | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Apollo Global Management; Yahoo; Brightspeed; Legendary; Alyssa Powell/Insider1. That, in a nutshell, is life at Apollo Global Management. The firm works on a points system that could most easily be described as a profit-share system, Casey told me. In other news:France's Kylian Mbappe celebrates with the trophy after winning the World Cup REUTERS / Kai Pfaffenbach2. You're not just watching the World Cup.

☆ Real-estate tech firms are getting hammered by a cataclysmic reckoning that one VC called a cross between the 2001 dot-com bust and the 2008 market crash
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-16 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

The proptech sector is battling two challenges at once: a slowing housing market and a tech bust. For almost a decade, a growing group of companies have thrived by introducing tech innovations to a stubbornly analog real-estate industry. "Now we're seeing something that feels like a confluence between the 2001 dot-com bust in the venture-capital world and the 2008 market crash in real estate. Shares of both Opendoor and Redfin, which once drew investor attention to the soaring proptech industry, are worth roughly one-tenth what where they were a year ago. The company hasn't laid off any of its 300-person staff — including a roughly 50-person tech team — and doesn't plan to, Matthews said.

☆ Opendoor CEO Eric Wu says it will cut 550 employees as the $1.5 billion home-flipping company struggles to turn a profit
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-02 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Opendoor announced that it will lay off 18% of its staff, a total of about 550 workers. During third quarter the firm offered generous incentives to drum up sales, eating into its bottom line. Opendoor is offering laid-off employees at least 10 weeks of severance pay and health-care coverage through February 2023, he said. How Opendoor has coped with a cooling housing marketBut recently, Opendoor has had to slash prices and offer richer concessions to lure buyers. Datadoor found that it took Opendoor a median of 113 days to flip a home between July and September.

☆ Opendoor slashed prices and paid buyers' agents $3,500 a house in a rush to off-load thousands of homes in the third quarter
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-01 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Opendoor cut prices and gave incentives in the third quarter, losing cash on much of its inventory. Opendoor has been offering buyers $15,000 credits and their brokers $3,500 bonuses. A decelerating housing market poses a challenge for iBuying companies like Opendoor, which use home-pricing algorithms to purchase homes. In the third quarter, Opendoor sold between 8,100 and 8,550 homes, according to an estimate by Datadoor, a startup that catalogs Opendoor's acquisition and sales activity across the country. The high end of Datadoor's estimate, 8,550 home sales, would be an 18% decrease in the number of sales Opendoor reported for the second quarter and 32% below the first quarter.

☆ Even Barry Sternlicht is getting hammered by rising rates. A recent deal his $6 billion firm backed out of shows how.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

The scuttled deal shows how rising rates have hit Starwood CEO Barry Sternlicht's bottom line. It has canceled its plans to purchase the Stamford, Connecticut, mortgage originator Luxury Mortgage Corp., according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. The situation with Luxury Mortgage, however, shows how rising rates have also affected Starwood's bottom line. A budding partnership was upended by rising ratesIn recent years, Starwood has become one of Luxury Mortgage's biggest customers. Luxury Mortgage's business has also been strained in recent months.

☆ Blackstone and Prologis turned warehouses from safe and boring investments into white-hot assets. Now they're battling to see who can own more.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-19 | by ( Alex Nicoll | Danielle Walker | Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

In other words, big money is buying up warehouse space as fast as smaller owners can sell. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated this change, with warehouse investment outpacing office investment in 2020 and 2021, according to CBRE. A Prologis warehouse in Ichikawa City, Japan. Prologis, Blackstone, and the rest of big money duke it outOther big-money investors have increasingly invested in warehouses. The UK's Segro once sold warehouse space to Blackstone — now it's acquiring its own warehouses for last-mile delivery that Blackstone might have otherwise picked up for itself.

☆ Compass is in a precarious position. It's worth a fraction of its IPO valuation, it's never turned a profit, and employees say the former centerpiece of the business — its vaunted tech tools for agent
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-10 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +16 min

Reffkin (left) and Compass cofounder Ori Allon. Tech had been central to Compass' original missionFor years, Compass executives, including Reffkin, credited the company's tech with its meteoric rise in the residential-real-estate business. Though Compass' tech team still has 700 people, many more than any rival brokerage, the September layoffs seemed to initiate what insiders expect to be continuing cuts to the unit. "Robert is like Steve Jobs but without the insight," the veteran engineer who left Compass earlier this year said. Reffkin (left) and Allon ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

☆ Compass employees question the real-estate brokerage's cost cutting, saying it threatens the startup's tech ambitions
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-10 | by ( Kaja Whitehouse | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

This is Kaja Whitehouse reporting to you from New York City, where real estate isn't just a profession — it's an obsession. But you don't have to be preoccupied with real estate, or located in the Big Apple, to known about Compass, the fast-rising real-estate brokerage that IPOed last year. When Compass IPOed in April 2021, it garnered a $7 billion valuation — the highest price ever for a residential real estate brokerage. In other news:Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon moonlights as a DJ, and is now set to play at the Lollapalooza music festival in July. It's no secret that Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon has been under pressure over his burgeoning consumer banking division Marcus.

☆ Compass CFO Kristen Ankerbrandt explains how the fast-growing brokerage company can reap profits
▼ + stars: | 2021-12-07 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

The CFO of Compass believes profits will catch up to the real-estate brokerage's rapid growth. The conversation took a turn when Compass' CEO and cofounder, Robert Reffkin, suggested instead that Ankerbrandt join as its chief financial officer. Earlier this year, Ankerbrandt helped steward Compass' much-anticipated initial public offering that valued the firm at about $7 billion. "We had $370 million in revenue in 2017, and we did $3.7 billion in 2020, which is pretty incredible," Ankerbrandt said. For years, upstarts in the residential real-estate business have sought to displace or deprioritize the role of the broker.

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