Stuyvesant Town Rent Party

Those wild and crazy folks at Tishman Speyer (TS) are raising the roof at Stuyvesant Town, the Manhattan apartment complex TS owns. However, TS isn't sharing its love with tenants. Instead, according to Crain's New York, TS is "offering more than $20,000 in prizes to referring agents" who produce new tenants willing to pay "market rates" for Manhattan's best-known redoubt of rent control/rent stabilized tenancy.

Incentives are nothing new in New York real estate. What is a curiosity is that TS, which purchased the apartment complex from MetLife in a very highly leveraged deal gone stupendously bad, said "No Mas" to its high-profile creditors recently. That's right: bankrupt. Where is TS getting the red-meat money to throw at the retail rental agent dogs?

TS didn't limit its financial folly to New York. The firm owns a number of big-time buildings in Chicago which have cash flow issues. The Federal Reserve, one of TS' creditors in the Chicago caper, recently reworked TS' repayment terms so that they were much more favorable to TS. (Thank you, CrainsNY.) That means taxpayers are footing the bill.

Some rent party, don't you think?