Other Peoples Money, Charles V. Bagli
Other Peoples Money, Charles V. Bagli
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Other People's Money
Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made

Author: Charles V. Bagli

Narrator: David Drummond

Unabridged: 12 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/04/2013


Synopsis

In just over three years, real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of investors' dollars on a single deal. In Other People's Money, Charles V. Bagli, the New York Times reporter who first broke the story of the sale of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village takes listeners inside the most spectacular failure in real estate history, using this single deal as a lens to see how and why the real estate crisis happened.

How did the smartest people in real estate lose billions in one single deal? How did the Church of England, the California public employees' pension fund, and the Singapore government lose more than one billion dollars combined investing in a middle-class housing complex in New York City? How did MetLife make three billion dollars on the deal without any repercussions from a historically racist policy of housing segregation? And how did nine residents of a sleepy enclave in New York City win one of the most unlikely lawsuits in the history of real estate law?

Not only does Other People's Money answer those questions, it also explains the current recession in stark, clear detail while providing riveting first-person accounts of the titanic failure of the real estate industry to see that a recession was coming. It's the definitive book on real estate during the bubble years—and what happened when that enormous bubble exploded.

About Charles V. Bagli

Charles V. Bagli is a New York Times reporter who covers the intersection of politics and real estate. He has written about the sale of high-profile buildings, political contributions of the real estate industry, the battle to build a two-billion-dollar stadium for the Jets, bid rigging in the construction industry, payoffs at the tax assessor's office, and a Sutton Place co-op that turned public land into a private park. He has worked for the New York Observer, the Daily Record of Morristown, New Jersey, the Tampa Tribune and the Brooklyn Phoenix. He lives with his wife in New Jersey. They have two daughters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric

The author could have, I think, benefited from a more conscientious editor; I noted a number of passages that were repeated a very short time after they had been expressed in a very slightly altered context - a minor irritant but notice. My bigger complaint stems from the sweep of the title not bein......more

Goodreads review by K.

Fair warning: If one is looking for wide-ranging analysis on the housing bubble/crisis, this most definitely is NOT your book. It's very specifically about "my hometown" … the Stuyvesant Town complex on the East Side of Manhattan, which borders First Avenue to the West, the East River to the East, 2......more

Goodreads review by Ben

I really enjoyed this book. I found it an excellent analysis of the housing crisis. Parts of this book was really infuriating to me. Would recommend to learn more. 4.8/5......more

Goodreads review by Lakshay

Good book to understand the madness of the commercial real estate market in the lead up to 2008-09 crises.......more

Goodreads review by Robert

This was an interesting if meandering book. I got the impression several times while reading the book that telling the story of the deal itself and its aftermath was not enough for an entire book and so it needed to be beefed up a bit. The book goes into the history of the complex, which was fairly i......more