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☆ Matt Onofrio made $35 million helping everyday people invest in real estate. Then he was indicted. Was it all a scam?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +21 min

The MMA fighter Michael Chandler, pictured with his wife, Brie Willett, bought a $16 million property from Matt Onofrio in 2021. Then, in November 2022, federal prosecutors indicted Onofrio on charges involving three deals he'd arranged in Minnesota the year before. The federal complaint doesn't involve the property Onofrio sold to Chandler. Unbeknownst to Hermann, Onofrio had already tied up the warehouse in contract for $4.75 million. "Matt was finding a deal for $4 million and selling it for $5 million," Stageberg said.

Persons: Matt Onofrio, anesthetist, who'd, Onofrio, Michael Chandler, Chandler, Brie Willett, Rick Diamond, Michael didn't, Matt, Brendan Johnson, he'd, fraudster, who's, Matthew Hermann, Hermann, he's, —, Anthony Vicino, unburden, Hermann countersued, Let's, Nick Stageberg, Stageberg, Vicino, couldn't, wasn't, Zacari Pennington, Brandon Turner, David Greene, Pennington, Brad Lea's, Ryan Pineda's, Alec McElhinny, Onofrio's, Greene, Ed Mylett, Mylett, Lily Ro Onofrio, Lea, Brittany Arnason, BiggerPockets, Cameron Cropsey, Scott Trench, Nicholas Perrone, Wild Organizations: Onofrio, CMT, Chandler, Wild Moose Ventures, Finance & Commerce, Mayo Clinic, Moose Ventures, Wild, Ventures Locations: Wisconsin, California, Sauk Rapids , Minnesota, Minnesota, Onofrio, Minneapolis, Mexico City, Mayo, Denver, Nashville, Church, Golden Valley , Minnesota, Macon , Georgia, Pennington

☆ Stephen Schwarzman says Blackstone has dumped office investments. Another corner of the firm kept lending billions.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Blackstone Mortgage Trust's $8.2 billion portfolio of office loans leaves it exposed to the sector. The Blackstone-managed firm issued about $3.3 billion of US office loans since the pandemic began. Even as clouds began to gather, Blackstone Mortgage Trust continued to lend to the office sector. In addition to managing the mortgage trust, Blackstone is among its largest shareholders. A Washington office complex shows how far values have fallenThere are ongoing issues, however, in Blackstone Mortgage Trust's portfolio.

☆ Sologamy: Why these women married themselves
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-28 | by ( Faith Karimi | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

Its adherents may be on to something, this expert saysThe concept of self-marriage, or sologamy, has been around for years. No data exists on how many people celebrate sologamy with ceremonies, but the practice has been explored in a handful of recent news articles. CNN talked to four women who’ve married themselves. Sologamy is not legally binding in the US and is not recognized by the laws of any country. Fideli’s message to younger women struggling with self-esteem issues: It’s never too late to love yourself.

☆ Big landlords are barreling towards a 'reckoning.' But smaller ones are doing just fine.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Kathleen Elkins | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Some big landlords are starting to feel the squeeze of stalled rents and increased operating expenses. The main difference between 'big' and 'small' landlords: the financingA key difference between smaller, mom-and-pop landlords and larger landlords is how they're financing deals. While small landlords are typically purchasing single-family homes or multi-family properties like duplexes and triplexes, which you can finance with residential debt, big landlords are buying apartment buildings and have to use commercial debt. With a residential loan, you can typically get a fixed interest rate, which will not change over the lifetime of the loan. "One of the reasons I invest in four units or less is you get 30-year fixed rate debt," he said.

Sam Zell — the legendary, outspoken real-estate tycoon and self-made billionaire who founded a property empire — has died, his company announced on Thursday. Zell was 81. This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

☆ No office tower is safe from the roiling market — not even a trophy building housing Google and Visa deemed one of the best
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Potential problems at One Market Plaza show how far San Francisco's office market may fall. One Market Plaza has long been considered the pinnacle of San Francisco's office market. Autodesk plans to downsize by about 73,000 square feet to 211,000 square feet, a spokeswoman told Insider. Google did not respond to a request for comment on its plans for One Market Plaza. One Market Plaza could indicate how far San Francisco's office woes reachTurbulence at One Market Plaza indicates the extent of the problems facing San Francisco's office market.

☆ Early Asos and Boohoo investor leads $10 million round in discount fashion marketplace startup Secret Sales
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Riddhi Kanetkar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

UK-based fashion marketplace startup Secret Sales has raised a $10 million Series B round. Clothing marketplace startup Secret Sales has raised $10 million in a round led by an early backer of fashion giants Asos and Boohoo despite a cooldown in investor interest in the sector. Some fast fashion retailers are under investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority for supposedly greenwashing how eco-friendly their fashion lines and manufacturing efforts have been. This allows brands to connect to Secret Sales in under two weeks, while legacy outlets take up to eight weeks, Griffin added. Secret Sales' "model is not just a small niche of a market, it's a vast market, and it scales potentially globally," said Iain McDonald, founder of Belerion Capital Group.

☆ Banks are finally admitting they have a problem with billions of dollars in looming real-estate defaults
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-01 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

This earnings season, some major banks bucked tumult in the sector by raking in record revenues and surpassing Wall Street expectations. The bank separately disclosed $725 million of "non-accrual loans" tied to office assets — debts that are already delinquent on payments. That was a nearly fourfold increase in dollar volume of bad office loans over the previous quarter held by the bank. Even some loans tied the nation's robust market for apartment buildings have faltered recently. Anderson said about $760 billion of office loans were held by banks, which amounts to roughly 35% of their commercial-real-estate debt.

☆ Landlords pumped billions into apartment buildings during the pandemic. That bet could now go horribly wrong.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-16 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Big money investors pumped billions into buying up apartment buildings in the pandemic era. But fault lines have emerged for investors who paid top dollar for assets that depended on substantial rent increases and persistent low interest rates to achieve profitability. In those years, investors purchased $355.5 billion and $299.2 billion worth of apartment buildings, according to MSCI — unprecedented sums that far surpassed the previous $194 billion record of multifamily sales in 2019. "It's early, but it's going to become a bigger story, especially if interest rates stay high and lending standards are tight," said Alan Todd, the head of commercial-mortgage-backed-securities strategy at BofA Global Research. As these short-term debts come due, they will be difficult to swap with commensurately sized loans today, because of the falling values, higher interest rates, and lender caution.

☆ Landlords who bought thousands of apartments are facing a reckoning
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Investors showed outsize interest in apartment buildings during the pandemic. Rents and occupancy rates were rising, interest rates remained relatively low, and rental-property prices were climbing with no sign of letting up during a surge in housing demand. Laguna Point did not respond to a request for comment. Marc McDevitt, a senior managing director at Cred iQ, said it was possible Laguna Point had lost some, or even all, of its investment in the deal. While offices have been going through a paradigmatic shift as more workers do their jobs remotely, apartment buildings have experienced robust demand from tenants.

☆ McDonald's same-store growth will accelerate past internal estimates: UBS' Geiger
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-10 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailMcDonald's same-store growth will accelerate past internal estimates: UBS' GeigerDennis Geiger, UBS analyst, joins 'Power Lunch' to discuss Geiger's thoughts on McDonald's, the company's decision to layoff employees and more.

☆ Commercial real estate loans are the next major risk for banks, a top analyst said. Here are the top 20 institutions exposed to property debt.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-30 | by ( Alex Nicoll | Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Silicon Valley Bank's historic collapse this month helped trigger the failures of a few other financial institutions and weeks of chaos in the world of finance. On Friday, a Bank of America analyst pinpointed commercial-real-estate loans as the next major risk for banks. Regional banks like Silicon Valley Bank hold 68% of all commercial-real-estate loans, many tied to struggling sectors, like office buildings. Even more worrisome, a massive $450 billion in commercial-real-estate loans is maturing this year, and most of that is held by banks. Silicon Valley Bank wasn't a major lender to the sector, but the failed Signature Bank, the 10th-largest lender on this list, was.

☆ Office Doom Loop: Landlords Face a Reckoning As Companies Move to Fancy Offices
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-30 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

The Gas Company Tower in downtown Los Angeles has a sterling pedigree, but even that can't save it from the doom loop facing many older office towers. A huge swath of America's office market is vulnerable to these twin threats of being under-equipped with amenities and underwater financially. This behavioral shift has deeply cut into demand for office space. The amount of sublease space nationally more than doubled from 118.5 million square feet at the end of 2019 to 242.8 million square feet at the end of 2022, Colliers stated. Lenders are often reluctant, he said, to seize office buildings because of the costs and expertise required to operate the properties.

Last year VCs invested $19.8 billion into these property-technology, or proptech, startups. We surveyed venture capitalists to identify the hottest proptech companies right now. Climatetech and AI-powered tools are major themes of the proptech industry in 2023, just as they are in the wider venture world. Insider asked more than 20 venture investors who focus on real-estate and construction technology to nominate the most exciting proptech startups in 2023. Here are the 26 buzziest proptech companies right now, presented in alphabetical order.

☆ Tiny homes, big problems
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-06 | by ( Daniel Geiger | Alex Nicoll | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +21 min

Beyond their star appeal, low-cost tiny homes like Casitas have real-world utility. The homes have been seized upon as a solution for cities like Los Angeles to house the homeless. They showed off their homes' transportability by hitching several of them to a Tesla and filming drag races between Teslas and trucks that were hooked to trailers carrying the homes. So far, though, after a little more than a year of building, the company has fabricated only about 400 homes. Even if it were churning out thousands of units, Boxabl hasn't yet received the certifications required to sell them in most states across the country.

☆ Bayer braces for falling profits in challenge for new CEO
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-28 | by ( Ludwig Burger | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Bayer said in a statement that earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA), adjusted for special items, would likely be between 12.5 billion euros and 13 billion euros ($13.2 billion - $13.8 billion) this year, excluding the effect of currency swings. Bayer said this month it would replace its CEO early, recruiting former Roche (ROG.S) executive Bill Anderson, amid demands by some investors that Bayer should simplify its diversified structure and split into separate groups. A $6.4 billion provision remained on the balance sheet for glyphosate payouts, the larger of the two legal burdens. So Bayer should really not be on the buy list of many investors at the moment," said Molnar. Bayer saw herbicide sales jump 44% in 2022 after hurricane Ida damaged rival producers and constrained Chinese suppliers failed to plug the gap.

☆ Fashion brand 'Unhidden' brings clothes made for all bodies to London Fashion Week
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-18 | by ( Sarah Mills | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/5] Designer Victoria Jenkins poses following her catwalk show "Unhidden: A New Era in Fashion", with designs presented by models who all live with a disability, chronic condition or visible difference, during London Fashion Week in London, Britain, February 17, 2023. REUTERS/Henry NichollsLONDON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Fashion designer Victoria Jenkins unveiled stylish and practical clothes made for people with disabilities on the runway at London Fashion Week on Friday, in a collection intended to address a gap in the market. "Unhidden is an adaptive fashion brand… primarily targeted at inclusion within fashion of people with disabilities," Jenkins told Reuters. "It also has openings all down the arm," she said, so that anyone going through treatment "can access their arm without taking any clothes off. Model and content creator Jessica Ping-Wild, who uses a prosthetic leg and struggles to find suitable trousers, said a brand like Unhidden makes all the difference.

☆ Commercial real estate's biggest investors are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the grittiest land in America. Here's why.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Big commercial-real-estate players from Brookfield to Fortress are snapping up industrial land. Brookfield is one of several big-name investors that are paying increasing attention to lowly industrial land. Industrial land also generally has lower operating costs and taxes compared to other real estate. It's hard to find big enough portfolios of industrial landThere are challenges, too, in breaking into the business of owning industrial land. Atkins said he has been impressed by the robustness of the IOS market, even with fears about the broader economy.

Tiny-home startup Boxabl amassed a 160,000-person wait list since Elon Musk was linked to a Casita. Max, who put down a $2,400 deposit for a Casita in 2021, told Insider he is fed up with the delay. They told Insider they've received little communication from the company about when the homes, called Casitas, will be finished. One Arizona-based prospective buyer, Max, told Insider that he put $2,400 down for two Boxabl homes in 2021. Boxabl's founders — the colorful father-and-son team of Paolo and Galiano Tiramani — told Insider the six-year-old startup is now worth $3 billion.

☆ A tiny-home startup has attracted 160,000 customers, including Elon Musk. But disgruntled customers, an empty factory, and a tie to an alleged Iranian agent cloud its future.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-06 | by ( Daniel Geiger | Alex Nicoll | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +17 min

A Boxabl Casita being delivered to a SpaceX facility in Texas. Tackling the US housing crisisStamped out on an assembly line, Boxabl homes could finally begin to help quench America's perpetual housing shortage. Homeowners, meanwhile, could rent out Boxabl units as secondary dwellings in their backyards or as Airbnbs. Firooznia, Tiramani said, sometimes provided a tiebreaking vote when the father and son disagreed on business decisions. During a tour of Boxabl's factory in December, a freelance reporter for Insider saw Tiramani's wife, Shauna, arrive with their four young children.

☆ How do you lose a radioactive capsule? Australian investigators are wondering too
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( Hilary Whiteman | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

Brisbane, Australia CNN —The discovery of a tiny lost radioactive capsule beside a remote highway in Western Australia raises many questions – not least how it escaped layers of radiation-proof packaging loaded onto a moving truck. Under the Radiation Safety Act 1975, only specially trained and licensed operators can package radioactive substances, but different rules apply to contractors hired to transport it, Steen said. “Any transport company can transport radioactive material provided they have got the license to do so,” she said. Staff from the National Emergency Management Agency, the Australian Nuclear and Science Technology Organization and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency also took part. This time, it traveled in a convoy of enclosed white vehicles – with big stickers warning of the presence of a radioactive substance.

☆ We expect positive commentary from Starbucks on China, says UBS analyst Dennis Geiger
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-30 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

In this videoShare Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailWe expect positive commentary from Starbucks on China, says UBS analyst Dennis GeigerUBS analyst Dennis Geiger joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss how analysts believe China will impact business, how Geiger feels about Starbucks' stock, and more.

☆ BofA Promoted 93 New MDs in Global Markets — Here Are the Names
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-26 | by ( Alex Morrell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Bank of America announced 93 new managing directors in Global Markets on Thursday. The division in 2022 saw sales and trading revenues climb to its highest mark since 2010.Insider has all the names of the newly promoted MDs. On Thursday the bank announced a new class of 360 managing directors, including 93 from the firm's Global Markets division — up from 86 last year. The bank's Global Corporate and Investment Bank promoted 87 new MDs. BofA made $16.5 billion in 2022 from sales and trading — including a fourth-quarter record of $3.7 billion — the highest tally for the firm since 2010.

☆ News Corp plans to sell real estate giant Move Inc, valued at $1.4 billion, to CoStar as Rupert Murdoch shelves proposed merger of News Corp and Fox
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Claire Atkinson | Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

News Corp is in talks to sell Move Inc, the operator of listings site Realtor.com, to CoStar. The news comes as executive chairman Rupert Murdoch shelves a News Corp merger with Fox. News Corp is planning to sell Move Inc., the California-based operator of Realtor.com and other real estate listings sites, to CoStar, a commercial real estate data and technology firm. One News Corp shareholder, Irenic Capital, had argued against the merger, suggesting that News Corp could benefit shareholders if it unlocked the value of its holdings including Dow Jones and the real estate assets. The balance is held by News Corp's digital real estate subsidiary REA.

Twitter staff have spotted cockroaches in changing rooms and showers, sources told Insider. A representative for the company that owns the office building declined to comment. Staff at the office in Chelsea have seen cockroaches in the showers and a changing room at the facility, sources said. Twitter is the only direct leasee at the office building which is listed as a "Class B" building on CoStar, a commercial real estate database. Some staff at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco have been sleeping in the office after Musk issued an ultimatum for staff to work "extremely hardcore."

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