Tishman Speyer Hands Over Keys To Stuy Town

New York is a unique town, so it's only fitting that it should have it's own unique version of the real estate crash -- one that is writ large.

Today, lenders took back the keys to one of the city's biggest apartment complexes, the massive Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, ending a months-long saga. But Stuy Town may be just the first of many: more than 100 large apartment complexes in the Big Apple may be headed into foreclosure, largely because speculators overpaid and under-estimated the local rent laws.

The red brick towers at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village sold for $5.4 billion back in 2006 to a partnership led by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Inc. That's still the largest amount ever paid for a single residential property -- the price works out to about half a million per apartment.