BY DANIEL GEIGER

A few years ago, a city Department of Finance official noticed irregularities in the way certain residential properties had been appraised by the agency, leading to slightly lower-than-normal valuations.

To compensate, the official suggested the department decrease its assessments across the board for the group, which mostly comprised single-family homes and small co-op buildings in an area of one of the boroughs.

Dropping the valuations slightly below usual thresholds would reduce the taxes the city could collect, but only by a few percentage points—a seemingly harmless amount in the face of the billions of dollars the agency assesses—and it would allow the department to restore uniformity and equanimity to its calculations, one of the mandates of its process.

What appeared to be an innocuous adjustment, however, garnered a backlash that was swift and forceful. Top officials at the department were summoned to Mayor Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse. There they were confronted by the mayor and irate senior executives from the city’s budget office, the person said.

Though the theme of the meeting was ostensibly to discuss the irregularities and why the department had chosen lower assessments, the underlying message was clear: don’t trifle with the city’s revenue.

“I feel like we got taken out to the backyard to get whipped,” the source said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the meeting.

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BY IAN THOMAS

As a pair of 26-foot steel beams were hoisted high above Manhattan on April 30, the crowd below spoke of resilience, hope and remembrance.

One World Trade Center had just hit a height of 1,271 feet, making it the city’s tallest building. Port Authority Executive Director Pat Foye said in a press conference that the building will “anchor Lower Manhattan and its rebirth for many generations to come.”

But tourists and tristate residents aren’t the only ones noticing the change in the city skyline. A number of commercial property owners are looking to the tower and other developments as a hopeful bellwether for the future, despite what most analysts still describe as a stagnant market.

The numbers speak for themselves. Real estate brokers leased 12.9 million square feet through July 31, 2012, a 28 percent drop from the 17.9 million square feet inked during the same period in 2011, according to a CBRE report. Vacancy sat at 7.5 percent, no change from a year earlier.

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BY CARL GAINES

On a recent late-summer conference call, William Rudin, Michael Rudin and Samantha Rudin Earls—three members of one of New York City’s most venerable commercial real estate families—were engaged in a bit of dactylonomy.

The three weren’t trying to come up with the number of buildings currently in the family’s commercial and residential portfolio, but rather were adding up the number of family members currently working at the company.

“That’s two, four ...” Some names were mumbled. After a little back and forth, they settled on nine. In a city known for the prominence of a handful of families in commercial real estate, single names like Rudin, Durst, Rose, Muss and LeFrak have come to symbolize the industry. These families have survived the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression while witnessing, along with the rest of us, the rise of real estate investment trusts, the top three of which now have a combined New York portfolio of roughly 67.6 million square feet.

In a era when the word ‘dynasty’ is often overused and left to trail behind words like—let’s face it—‘sports’ or ‘Kardashian,’ it finds true meaning when one surveys these biggest families in New York commercial real estate. Many of them, after all, are generations old and still control vast portfolios of properties while wielding the type of power that only comes with reputation and recognition.

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BY IAN THOMAS

On a balmy July afternoon, a few members of SL Green’s management staff pushed their way through the revolving doors of 711 Third Avenue, the company’s 500,000-square-foot, 20-floor tower between 44th and 45th Streets.

They passed through the gallery-style lobby, framed by both Greek Thassos white and De Savoi grey-blue marble, carrying a few boxes. An original Hans Hoffman mosaic mural, designed in 1956, adorned the hallway farther down.

They sliced open the boxes and put on green aprons emblazoned with the firm’s stylized logo—and so the ice cream party for the building’s tenants began.

In a market full of haves and have-nots, there are benefits to being the biggest fish in the pond.

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BY DANIEL EDWARD ROSEN

Curious onlookers often wonder aloud whom Leslie Wohlman Himmel is married to.

The question has less to do with her romantic life than with her rise as one of New York City’s few female building owners, a position she has navigated with aplomb as one half of Himmel + Meringoff Properties, the real estate ownership group she has overseen with partner Stephen Meringoff for nearly three decades.

To hear it from colleagues, competitors and peers, her gender has caused many to presume, incorrectly, that she either married into the industry or had exchanged vows with her partner in business, Mr. Meringoff.

“She arrived on the scene, not from a New York City family,” said Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive officer of CBRE. “In the early years, when she was acquiring properties, people would say, ‘Who’s she related to?’”

The number of women who can actually boast the title “owner-slash-landlord” is slim, largely due to difficulties in obtaining capital. Women like Laurie Zucker of the Zucker Organization, Helena Durst of The Durst Organization, Amy Rose of Rose Associates, and Veronica Mainetti of the Sorgente Group are notable landladies in a male-dominated field of New York owners. Alas, they, like Ms. Himmel, are outliers in an era when it is becoming harder for women to earn the money required to elevate them to the same ranks as male owners.

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