High rents buoy Soho side streets

Building sales on Soho’s side streets are soaring, according to the New York Times. Last week the King of Greene, a Isaac F. Duckworth-designed building at 72-76 Greene Street, sold for $41.5 million — a 47 percent increase from when it last sold five years ago.

In November, two mixed-use Buildings Across The Street at 69 and 71-73 Greene Street, between Spring and Broome streets, traded hands for about $33 million. In May, Savannah paid about $57.5 million for a mixed-use Jean Nouvel-designed building at 40 Mercer Street. And in July, the last vacant corner lot in Soho, at 144 Spring Street on the corner of Wooster Street, sold to Ralph Bartel, the founder of Travelzoo and a major investor in Lanvin and Devi Kroell, for $26.5 million, according to RKF data cited by the Times.

In all, 38 buildings have traded for more than $626 million in neighborhood this year — compared to eight sales totaling $64 million in 2009.

“Urban retail in prime Manhattan submarkets like Soho is trading at well past all-time highs,” Dan Fasulo, a managing director at Real Capital Analytics, said. “There is a wave of capital that wants into this niche, and retailers are increasingly willing to pay rent that justifies some of these high prices.”

And with less square footage than the Roosevelt Field Mall, competition for Soho’s prime buildings is expected to continue pushing prices up in years to come. [NYT] —Christopher Cameron