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DURING THE DARK DAYS of New York's real estate market in the early 1990s, when the Japanese were trying to unload their deflated portfolios and local developers were sidelined by a lack of financing, Frankfurt-based investors Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs stepped into the void.
They began snapping up office buildings in midtown, soon amassing a $200 million, seven-building portfolio that includes 400 Park Ave., 830 Third Ave. and 345 Park Avenue South. On the residential side, their RFR Holding Corp. started building luxury apartments and now has more than 500 units completed or under way. With the purchase in September of an office building on lower Sixth Avenue's blossoming retail strip, the company's Manhattan holdings now total some $500 million, Mr. Rosen says.
Meet the new poster boys of foreign investment. Messrs. Rosen and Fuchs are among the wealthy Germans who are beginning to challenge the Japanese as the largest foreign holders of property in New York.
Attracted at first by the bargains they found when the market was sluggish, newcomers--who also include the Chinese and the latest generation of the Dutch--have been drawn more recently by escalating occupancy and rents.
Getting in on hot market
While their enthusiasm doesn't match the overleveraged buying spree undertaken by many Japanese corporations in the mid-1980s, they, too, seek the prestige of owning buildings in a hot market. Instead of focusing almost exclusively on Class A office space, the newer investors are branching out, looking at Class B properties...