Peter Slatin

After refining The Slatin Report over the past five years into a reliable source for real estate industry insiders, Peter Slatin has officially bid the blogosphere farewell.

In "Moving On," his final post on his Web site, www.theslatinreport.com, Mr. Slatin officially announced that he would be shuttering The Report and moving to Real Capital Analytics:

"As RCA's Editorial Director and Associate Publisher, I will be responsible for their closely watched Capital Trends publications. These include monthly editions covering Office, Retail, Apartments and Industrial in the US as well as a quarterly Hotel report. These publications, like RCA's data – and like The Slatin Report, have become industry standards that professionals turn to for clear market intelligence and analysis

I will also be focusing on an important publication that RCA introduced this year, Global Capital Trends. GCT tracks the increasingly influential movement of capital into and out of real estate across borders and continents."

 read more »

Mr. Slatin calls the Freedom Tower, for which steel columns were placed last week, "the egregiously clunky and skyline-sucking icon that Larry Silverstein and outgoing New York Governor George Pataki are determined to force on the city."

He, however, reserves his most searing ire for the Atlantic Yards project, which was approved by the state Public Authorities Control Board last week. Declaring some parts of it admirable (the new Nets arena, the fact that it will eradicate an old train yard), Mr. Slatin nevertheless dubs Atlantic Yards no better than one of the worst Hollywood movies yet made:

[Bruce] Ratner and [Frank] Gehry's Atlantic Yards, however, is more like "Ishtar" than, say, "Vertigo": big and stupid. Gehry's design deftly succeeds at simply overpowering itself and its surroundings, and offers its residents no homey concessions to the place they call home. It has all the urban charm of Cabrini-Green.

Ouch.

The Plaza.

In addition to purchasing a townhouse at 53 East 77th Street for $15.75 million, Mr. Macklowe reportedly plans hotel and luxury condominium developments in the East 50's.

Now, Peter Slatin reports that Mr. Macklowe has just purchased two units at The Plaza. Perhaps, not as a coincidence, the luxurious apartments face the General Motors Building, a skyscraper across Fifth Avenue that Mr. Macklowe bought for $1.4 billion a few years back.

As with the townhouse purchase, Macklowe Properties is not saying a word about the company's plans.  read more »