Carlos Slim Buys Another Little Piece of New York

Guardian UK

The Duke Semans mansion, located on the corner of 82nd Street and 5th Avenue in New York, will not be a residence for Carlos Slim. Photograph: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News

 

 

Mexican telecoms billionaire Carlos Slim pays £28m for an eight-storey Manhattan townhouse he does not plan to live in

Mexican telecoms billionaire Carlos Slim, reputed to be the world's richest man, has splashed out $44m (£28m) on an eight-storey mansion on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in one of New York's most expensive ever house purchases.

According to New York City's property records, a company controlled by Slim struck a deal on 16 July to buy the so-called Duke Semans mansion, which boasts 12 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms and 19,500 square feet (1,800 sq metres) of floor space, a vast amount of room by the crowded standards of densely populated Manhattan.

The building, completed in 1901 for a tobacco magnate, Benjamin Duke, is on the corner of 82nd Street on New York's upper east side and is described by estate agency Brown Harris Stevens as "a residence for the ages – a home whose history-filled past is a wonderful prologue for the next era in its remarkable existence".

The purchase is the latest foray into New York by Slim, a cigar-smoking 70-year-old tycoon whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $53.5bn, ranking him top in the global wealth league, above Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. He recently paid $140m for a New York office building and has a 7% stake in the New York Times, having pumped $250m into the newspaper publisher at the height of the recession last year.

A spokesman told Bloomberg News that the telecoms magnate was buying the Duke Semans mansion as an investment and did not intend to live in it. The house has marble flooring, a gothic-inspired marquee over its main entrance and views of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The purchase price is the fourth-highest ever for a townhouse in New York. Slim's company bought the property from another billionaire, Tamir Sapir, who made his money in the Russian oil industry. But the deal is not the most expensive in New York; a number of apartments have changed hands for higher prices, including a three-storey flat in the Plaza hotel, overlooking Central Park, which was sold for $56m in 2007.

Slim's real estate investments follow in the footsteps of his father, a Lebanese immigrant who acquired property in downtown Mexico City after the Mexican revolution. The billionaire's properties in Mexico, held through Grupo Carso SAB, include shopping and office complexes, hospitals and educational campuses.

Bank to Take Prime Commercial Property in Beverly Hills

LA Times

British developers had paid $500-million for the site of the former Robinsons-May on Wilshire Boulevard in 2007. They had planned to develop condominiums and a hotel on the eight-acre parcel.

 The Candy Brothers

Jet-setting British developers are set to lose their prized real estate on a prime stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills on Friday as a bank controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim completes a foreclosure.

The property slipping away from brothers Nicholas and Christian Candy is the site of the former Robinsons-May department store at 9900 Wilshire Blvd., next door to the Beverly Hilton Hotel at the boulevard's intersection with Santa Monica Boulevard.

The Candy brothers, who planned to develop condominiums and a hotel, made headlines in 2007 when they bought the eight-acre parcel for $500 million. The jaw-dropping sum made the transaction one of the largest in the history of Los Angeles County.

Local real estate observers had trouble making sense of the price because the seller, Beverly Hills-based New Pacific Realty Corp., had paid $33.5 million for the property three years earlier. The Candys, though, had a track record of building super-premium residences for the mega wealthy.

"Candy & Candy in the U.K. is what Tiffany is to jewelry here," Laurie Lustig-Bower of brokerage CB Richard Ellis said at the time. "Therefore, they believe they will achieve record prices for their condos."

But the real estate market has changed dramatically for the worse in recent years, Lustig-Bower said Thursday. "2007 was a whole different world."

Now, Christian Candy's CPC Group is in default on a $365.5-million loan from lenders controlled by Slim's Banco Inbursa, according to court documents.

A subsidiary of CPC Group is expected to transfer title to the lenders Friday, sources told Bloomberg News.

Nicholas Candy confirmed in an e-mail that he expected to relinquish title to the site Friday.

CPC Group is best known for One Hyde Park in Central London, where buyers of the expensive flats included Russian oligarchs, oil barons, Saudia princes and A-list movie stars, according to the English press.

When they bought the Beverly Hills property, the Candys said they would proceed with the previous owner's plans to raze the empty department store and build a condominium and retail complex designed by Richard Meier, architect of the Getty Center.

The city approved the project in 2008. Later that year, with condo sales stalling and financing sources drying up, the Candys said they hoped to incorporate a five-star hotel into the design by eliminating some of the development's 235 approved condos.