BY DANIEL GEIGER

GroupM, the large advertising and media company, is in negotiations to anchor Three World Trade Center in a deal that would finally allow construction to begin on the planned 80-story office tower, The Commercial Observer has learned.

The potential deal, which is in preliminary talks according to several sources, is the closest yet developer Silverstein Properties has come to realizing the hulking 2.8 million-square-foot tower, designed by the Pritzker winning architect Norman Rodgers.

The lease would be about 550,000 square feet in size, several sources say, a large enough commitment to qualify the project for up to $600 million in public benefits in the form of a mix of equity and loan guarantees from the city, state and Port Authority.

That agreement was struck in 2010 with the Port Authority and required Silverstein to contribute $300 million in equity into the tower, pre-lease at least 400,000 square feet of its space and repay the building’s government backers before extracting any profits.

To read the full story, click here.

BY ROBERT KNAKAL

As we enter the fourth quarter of the year, the pressure has mounted on the sales brokerage community to get hundreds of transactions closed by year end.

With crunch time approaching, many of the younger brokers at Massey Knakal, and those in the industry whom I meet at networking events, have been asking me what the most common traits are that I observe in the most successful brokers, those who are able to work well under pressure.

While there are many skills required, below is a summary of 10 characteristics that I have noticed in brokers who have made it to the top of the pack in our industry.

To read the full story, click here.

BY ADELAIDE POLSINELLI

My son, who was born and raised in the heart of Manhattan, came home from college for the summer. His first day out for a drive across town sent him into frenzy. He was used to some sort of semblance in the traffic patterns of the already unpredictable New York City drivers. However, he was unprepared for the confusing palette of newly colored street lanes, designs, plazas and pathways. Red for bus lanes, white for God alone knows what, yellow for plows and green for bikes or people, whichever dared step in first.

Once he put aside his road rage, he begged me to explain how one was supposed to make intelligent choices when signals can be so misleading. I realized he was on to something. Finding the right platform to associate oneself within the brokerage industry can now be as exhausting and frustrating as the city’s confusing tangle of street patterns.

To read the full story, click here.

BY ROBERT SAMMONS

The Midtown Class A average asking rent, defying a rather weak leasing market, jumped 2.4 percent in the third quarter to close at $76.75 per square foot and is now at its highest since attaining $80.70 per square foot in January 2009.

It has risen in each of the three quarters thus far in 2012 and is up 8.3 percent year-to-date. Furthermore, each of the five Midtown submarkets has seen a rise this year (some quite substantially).

The Midtown Class A figure bottomed out most recently at $63.87 per square foot in September 2010 (well after the official close of the U.S. recession in June 2009). It remains, however, far from its record high of $99.22 per square foot in May 2008.

To read the full story, click here.

The November issue of The Mortgage Observer will feature the 20 most promising commercial mortgage brokers under 35 throughout the tristate area--but we need your help determining the best and brightest.

Whether it's thanks to financing volume or the complexity of the assignments they're given, we want to know who's racking up accolades in the mortgage industry, and we want your nominees for New York's next generation of mortgage brokers.

The due date for nominations is October 8, 2012. Those selected will be featured in our November issue. Include titles and company names for all submissions and include a little bit about why you think they deserve to be featured. Nominate yourself, a colleague, a friend or your son and daughter. Doesn't matter to us, just send your submissions by October 8.

Send nominations to topmortgagebrokers@observer.com. All emails will be kept strictly confidential.