New room for REITs

Building owners with just one or two properties may soon be able to tap into the real-estate investment trust market.

We caught up to Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick at the Bloomberg Real Estate Conference last week and asked if he had been thinking about grouping single buildings into REITs so the owners could take advantage of the capital markets.

“We think about it all the time,” Lutnick replied.

The first targets would likely be current Newmark Knight Frank client-buildings that could be grouped into either private or public REITs.

Lutnick’s public company, BGC Partners, which services financial institutions and is committed to “knowing how much anything is worth at any time,” completed its purchase of Newmark & Co. Real Estate last month, and there have been questions as to how the two companies will add value to each other.

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In a deal worth about $75 million, the ownership of the city’s first Apple store at 103 Prince St. in SoHo is changing.

Sources tell us Stanley Chera’s Crown Acquisitions has joined contract holder Ralph Tawil’s Centurion Realty to buy the roughly 30,000-square-foot building on the northeast corner of Greene Street.

“It’s pretty much an income stream [deal],” said one source, as Apple has at least eight years left on its lease. “They are buying the corporation that owns the fee.”

The former post office was leased by the Berk family’s Ingersoll Realty in 1975 with options through 2005. City records don’t show a deed, but a post office spokeswoman told us the lease was canceled in 2000. The building was leased to Apple in 2001.

Apple recently closed the store for a complete renovation and expansion into adjacent former post office and basement space and has opened temporarily at 72 Greene St.

Calls and e-mails to the parties were not returned by press time.

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The Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ is psyching up its members for a strike on Jan. 1. Members say they learned a lot from the four-week strike in Jan. 1996 and are ready to picket again.

“It was not as aggressive, it was not as united and not as coordinated” as it could be, said union member Sandy Deleon, who works at Donald Trump’s 40 Wall St. “It is going to be great. . . . That is what we are aiming for, and that is what we are getting ready to do. Personally, it will go down in history.

“I’m not looking forward to a strike,” Deleon added, “but if they force us, we will go on strike. I don’t think the city can take two weeks with us on the street.”

Office cleaners, porters and elevator operators get $22.65 an hour, totaling $905.02 per week and adding up to $47,061 per year. But owners make other contributions, including health and welfare benefits, that bring their annual costs to nearly $77,000.