Covering New York real estate

Geraldine Baum of The Los Angeles Times writes Thursday about The Real Deal, the magazine that covers the New York real estate market like a sporting event.

Baum writes, “At a meeting this month in the Real Deal’s sparely (early-Ikea) decorated Manhattan office, Stuart Elliott, the executive editor, urged his tiny staff to keep tracking the behavior of developers trying to stave off meltdown — and opportunists positioning to take advantage of it.

“They’d already run a map of Manhattan apartment buildings with the highest concentrations of Bernie Madoff victims. They’d described ugly ‘divorce’ battles between developers and their marketers. And they’d reported on a developer who got whacked over the head with an ice bucket during a dispute with his partner over a failing property.

“Elliott also checked in with a reporter following up on an earlier story about lenders so reluctant to foreclose on developers with underwater loans that they ‘extend and pretend’ the loan isn’t in trouble.”

Read more here.