The Daily Ten - NFL player LeSean McCoy wants to build a real estate empire using opportunity zones, The ‘metaverse’ bet: crypto-rich investors snap up virtual real estate...
Monday, April 19th, 2021
1. NFL player LeSean McCoy wants to build a real estate empire using opportunity zones | CNBC
National Football League running back LeSean McCoy admitted he had no clue how to handle finances earlier in his career. McCoy didn’t know how to make money from his large NFL paychecks, and saving wasn’t an option, either.
“Now being in my 12th year in the league, looking at all the investments I’ve made from the good to the bad, I think I’ve learned,” McCoy told CNBC.
It’s National Financial Literacy Month, and McCoy says he’s more motivated to further “generate finances not only for myself but also for my family.”
Months after getting his second Super Bowl ring, as McCoy was on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers roster, the 32-year-old player is using the offseason downtime to finish real estate developments. McCoy and his brother LeRon operate real estate firm Vice Capital. With McCoy’s playing days almost over, he’s using the real estate investment route to continue building wealth post-NFL.
2. WeWork’s New Stock-Listing Plan Has Echoes of Its Past | WSJ
Shared office-space company is touting fast future growth and high profitability
WeWork, which had one of the most spectacular IPO implosions in recent years, is trying to go public again—and some of the factors that worried regulators on the first deal are back again.
WeWork isn’t doing an initial public offering this time, but merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Rules around SPACs are looser than for IPOs, giving WeWork more leeway to tout its future.
The shared-office provider is expected to merge with a SPAC called BowX Acquisition Corp. BOWX -8.28%later this year. As the two entities promoted the deal to investors, they painted an optimistic scenario for the company’s growth and profitability.
3. One Way to Get People Off the Streets: Buy Hotels | The New York Times
For homeless people, a place to live is life changing to a degree that almost no other intervention can provide.
SAN FRANCISCO — The inside of the van was lined with plastic. The driver was masked and ready to go. There was a seat for just one passenger.
Gregory Sanchez eyed the setup warily. Mr. Sanchez was 64 and homeless, and the van was there to ferry him from a sidewalk tent to a room where he could shelter from the pandemic. It was good news, blessed news, he said. It was also a little creepy.
Mr. Sanchez didn’t know where he was going, and the sheets of foggy plastic, which coated the seats and windows to prevent the spread of disease, made it impossible to see out the window. Riding away from his longtime home in San Francisco’s Mission District, he cycled through dark possibilities — “It felt like I was in one of those movies where they take you to an army base or something” — before the door opened in front of a boutique hotel. He stepped down from the van and walked to a curved granite reception desk where he set a bin of clothes on a luggage cart.
4. Century-old Textile Building set for a revamp that includes penthouse | New York Post
The handsome former Textile Building at 295 Fifth Ave., a century-old monument to the city’s golden age of apparel-making, will soon sport a two-story penthouse addition — among other major changes to prepare the Midtown South property for new life as an wellness- and environmentally-attuned office building.
The penthouse — plus a ground-floor courtyard, several terraces and hospitality amenities — are part of a $350 million redevelopment by the building’s new owners, Tribeca Investment Group (TIG), PGIM Real Estate and Meadow Partners. They bought a 99-year leasehold in 2019 for $375 million.
TIG is tapping its expertise as developer of hotels — Midtown’s Baccarat and the FiDi Moxy — to help create what TIG founding principal Elliott Ingerman calls a “talent playground for large corporations to draw and retain talent.”
5. In New York City, Big Tech Is Bailing Out Big Real Estate | Jacobin Magazine
Tech firms have been moving into New York since well before the pandemic. But over the course of the last year, that trend has only accelerated, with the biggest companies all significantly expanding their footprints across the city as retail businesses shutter.
New York City’s office and retail real estate markets went through even more extreme convulsions. With office workers staying home, travel down to a bare minimum, and indoor congregating understood as a public health threat, the office vacancy rate in Manhattan soared to 15 percent. Around 20 percent of the city’s hotels closed, nearly all theater, music, and dance performances were cancelled, and countless neighborhood institutions disappeared.
As many businesses shuttered, the most conspicuous consumers of vacant space were technology firms. Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Google all went on leasing and construction sprees, renting scores of office spaces in Manhattan as well as building new distribution hubs in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. In this sense, big tech is bailing out big real estate, with some of the most extreme losses in commercial real estate buffered by this expanded footprint for tech companies — a somewhat surprising dynamic, given that tech companies are also prominently pivoting toward permanently remote workplaces.
6. Hedge Funds Are Ready to Get Out of New York and Move to Florida | Bloomberg
A tax hike is the latest reason the biggest moneymakers are debating leaving for the Sunshine State.
Carl Icahn has already left New York. Dan Sundheim is planning to leave. Larry Fink is staying, but is worried about its future.
New York was struggling to retain some of the world’s richest people and the firms they operate even before Governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers hiked taxes on millionaires and billionaires. Wall Street’s biggest names — including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Apollo Global Management Inc. and Point72 Asset Management — are taking steps to expand elsewhere, especially Florida.
Key to the Sunshine State’s allure is its income tax — it doesn’t levy any. By contrast, New York City’s wealthiest now face the highest state and local rates in the U.S.
“There definitely is an unprecedented migration of high-net-worth taxpayers from New York City, and some of them are taking their businesses with them,” said Timothy Noonan, a law partner at Hodgson Russ who specializes in tax residency issues. “With rates set to go up, they are ready to get out.”
7. The ‘metaverse’ bet: crypto-rich investors snap up virtual real estate | Reuters
What do you do with a $69 million artwork that doesn’t physically exist?
That’s the question faced by the Singapore-based investor calling himself Metakovan, who made headlines last month when he bought the digital artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by the American artist Beeple at Christie’s.
The work is a non-fungible token (NFT) – a new type of virtual asset that has its ownership status and authenticity verified by blockchain. NFTs have exploded in popularity in 2021, with prices skyrocketing.
Metakovan, real name Vignesh Sundaresan, plans to put the artwork on display in four virtual world environments. He is working with architects to design gallery complexes that the public can enter via web browsers or virtual reality technology.
8. Clubhouse Is Now a $4 Billion Company | Adweek
The social audio app closed its latest funding round
Clubhouse just announced it has closed its Series C funding round, which values the company at $4 billion. The round was led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with investors Tiger Global and DST Global joining for the first time.
Co-founder and CEO Paul Davidson confirmed the news in Sunday’s town hall with users. The details of the funding round were first reported by Bloomberg and The Information.
The social audio app has received plenty of hype in recent months, attracting an unending stream of press and mystique. It reports about 10 million monthly active users, but has experienced some significant fall-off in new growth this spring. While the app is still invite-only and iOS-only, it faces serious competition from Twitter Spaces which, while in beta, has already rolled out to Android users.
9. CoStar to purchase Norfolk-based Homes.com for $156M | Virginia Business
All-cash deal is set to close by mid-year
CoStar Group Inc. announced Wednesday it has reached an agreement to purchase Homes.com, a division of Norfolk-based Dominion Enterprises, for $156 million in cash.
Homes.com is a residential property listing and marketing portal that brings nearly 1.8 million residential property listings each month to its membership base of more than 500,000 residential real estate agents and brokers. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2021, according to Washington, D.C.-based CoStar, which has a significant presence in Richmond. CoStar Group, the nation’s leading provider of commercial real estate information and analytics, employs more than 4,600 people worldwide and manages a portfolio of online services that provide information on the hospitality, rental properties and commercial real estate sectors. CoStar also runs online marketplaces including Apartments.com and LoopNet.
10. Casa Blanca raises $2.6M to build the ‘Bumble for real estate’ | TechCrunch
Casa Blanca, which aims to develop a “Bumble-like app” for finding a home, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding.
Co-founder and CEO Hannah Bomze got her real estate license at the age of 18 and worked at Compass and Douglas Elliman Real Estate before launching Casa Blanca last year.
She launched the app last October with the goal of matching home buyers and renters with homes using an in-app matchmaking algorithm combined with “expert agents.” Buyers get up to 1% of home purchases back at closing. Similar to dating apps, Casa Blanca’s app is powered by a simple swipe left or right.
Samuel Ben-Avraham, a partner and early investor of Kith and an early investor in WeWork, led the round for Casa Blanca, bringing its total raise to date to $4.1 million.