Edelstein: It was a rather surprising move. I think it signals that there may be another round of consolidation in CMBS. I believe the CMBS business is actually a good business, but we went from 1^st to 131^st overnight after ’07. The market started ticking up at the beginning of the year and then the brakes were thrown on in June-July. When the market started to come back, there was an overabundance of growth. The supply exceeded the demand for CMBS loans. A lot of groups had more people than they could really justify on a business basis. I was just surprised to see how Credit Suisse reacted. I wouldn’t think that the major banks like the Wells Fargos and the Deutsche Banks are going to do the same. I think they will keep their crews until the market comes back, but I do think it signals that there might be another round of contrition and consolidation coming up until the market stabilizes.

GlobeSt.com: From a finance perspective, what makes One57 so attractive?

Edelstein: There are two things that have changed a lot in New York within the last year. If you were to ask me a year ago whether high-end condo construction or hotel financing was hot again, I would have giggled a little bit. But in the last month, we’ve closed three of them. High-end, ground-up construction deals are starting again, and One57 is a combination of the two. In this market, $700 million is a sizable deal. If it was a billion or more, it would be hard for the lending community to get together because you’d need a lot of lenders to put that kind of money out. And while we did billion dollar deals routinely pre-2007, in this market, deals of that scale for construction are very unusual. The other things the lender found attractive was the capital structure. There was an enormous amount of equity that came ahead of them, way more than half a billion. Folks don’t realize, but the loan is substantially reduced when the Park Hyatt takes over the hotel, so that loan gets dramatically reduced. On the condos, the banks underwrote on such a low number relative to what the developer is looking to sell at, that 20% of the units have to be sold to pay them back. Plus there’s some backup for the financing from the developer’s partner and Park Hyatt, so the lenders feel it’s an extremely safe project to go into.

GlobeSt.com: You’ve also worked with the Rudin Family on the financing for the redevelopment of St. Vincent’s Hospital Campus in Greenwich Village. Was that difficult to arrange?

Edelstein: If it is a well-known sponsor like the Rudins or Extell with a well-thought through plan in a good location, I think those projects are getting financed today. If John Smith has never done a project of that scale, walk into a lender in New York, there’s not a chance that John gets money. You are looking at a square block in a prime area of Greenwich Village. That kind of site doesn’t come up very often. These are the types of sites the banks are jumping on.

GlobeSt.com: Let’s talk about the East Village. How did you arrange $160 million for Minskoff’s 51 Astor without a major tenant yet?

Edelstein: When people hear spec office, which is effectively an office building that hasn’t landed an anchor tenant, people gasp because in the late 80s there was a lot of spec financing and we felt the pain of that in the 90s. From the early 90s probably until about last year, there was only one or two spec office buildings done in New York City. Banks have really held off on doing spec office for almost two decades because they felt it was a little too risky. Banks were comfortable with the location, the sponsor and the size of the project. It is adjacent to Cooper Union, mass transit hubs and NYU. It’s a funky area. Edward Minskoff has an amazing knack of finding locations ahead of its time and being extremely successful. He did a project at 280 Greenwich St. in TriBeCa a couple of years ago after 9/11 that everybody thought wouldn’t get done. But now Whole Foods and Barnes & Noble is downtown, and to me, it resembles the High Line site on the west side. In Minskoff’s building, he only needs one or two tenants and that building has a great branding opportunity for a tech company or life science firm. The feeling is before that building is built, Minskoff will have it filled up. It’s only 400,000 square feet. It’s not a 2 million-square-foot building, so you could find one tenant that could definitely take the building, or two 25,000-square-foot tenants.

GlobeSt.com: So even though stable, class A projects are getting done, what about the rest of the city? What challenges does Manhattan face in 2012?

Edelstein: Based on what’s going on in the world, there’s been a slowdown in the second half in 2011. I suspect that will overhang into the first half 2012, but then the second half will get very active. But there are four things that make New York City different than much of the country. Regardless of what happens with Wall Street and whether we have another small round of layoffs, the reality is New York is the financial center of the world and it is going to remain that way. We are the communications center of the world and the appetite for tech is almost unbounded. There is a lot of capital coming into New York, some of it quietly by foreign investors. Europeans are popping money into buildings here because they think the US is safe haven and New York is the best place to put their money. And lastly, people want to live here. When we went through the bubble and we looked at places like Miami, people were buying and flipping units, people actually want to live and invest in New York. Regardless of everything else, New York is one of the best tourist locations in the world. We have a tourist industry that is very strong and should remain strong. When you couple those things together, that’s what distinguishes us from much of the rest of the country. While there is a lot caution because no one knows what’s going to happen in New York given what’s happening in Europe, the fundamentals in New York now are not much different than they were a year ago. The office and leasing market has flattened a bit since the beginning of the year because rents were rising higher than anyone expected, and while things are pretty good now, I don’t think people are as optimistic now as they were in January, but rents aren’t falling; they’ve stabilized. Our bottom is a lot higher than the bottom of other parts around the country.