The Top 10 Multifamily Deals of the Decade

A year before buying Archstone, Tishman Speyer made a big splash with the largest individual acquisition in multifamily history. The purchase price for the 56-building, 11,250-unit Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village complex in New York cost a whopping $5.4 billion for the partnership of Tishman and BlackRock Realty. The partnership took on about $3 billion in securitized debt and an additional $1.5 billion mezzanine loan. The deal has become a poster child for the excesses of 2006, when cheap money flowed and underwriting assumptions pushed the envelope. When the transaction closed, about 80 percent of the development’s units were rent-stabilized, and the new owners hoped to convert the bulk of those units to market-rate. But the pace of conversions was slow, and was slowed further when residents sued the new owners, alleging that a number of the units had been wrongfully deregulated. In October 2009, the state’s highest court sided with the residents, and the very next month, the $3 billion mortgage was transferred to special servicing.