RePortersNoteBook.com: $5.4 Billion Real Estate Complex Handed Over to Creditors

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Owners-54B-NY-housing-apf-2493139299.html?x=0

AP - FILE - The Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town apartment complex is seen in New York in this ...

Owners: $5.4B NY housing complexes go to creditors

Owners: 2 NYC apartment complexes bought for record $5.4B will be turned over to creditors

On Monday January 25, 2010, 6:53 am EST

NEW YORK (AP) -- The financially troubled owners of two massive apartment complexes that sold for a record $5.4 billion a few years ago said Monday they're turning them over to their creditors.

The joint venture ownership team led by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty, hurt by the real estate market collapse, couldn't make a multimillion-dollar loan payment earlier this month for the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village apartments in Manhattan.

Over the last few days it became clear the only viable alternative to bankruptcy would be to transfer to lenders control and operation of the 110 buildings and 11,000 apartments overlooking the East River.

Tishman Speyer, whose other properties include Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, said it wouldn't consider a long-term management contract to continue operating the apartment complexes if it didn't involve ownership. It said it was committed to an efficient transition of the properties' operations and would manage them during that transition.

The housing complexes, which are so big they have their own newspaper, were built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for returning World War II veterans. MetLife Inc. decided to sell them in 2005, when real estate prices were soaring.