Barely a year after paying $140 million for a Lower Manhattan office tower at 2 Rector Street, Kushner Companies and CIM Group were recently entertaining offers for up to $200 million for the property, The Real Deal has learned.
The 465,000-square-foot, 26-story tower is located on the southeastern side of the World Trade Center, between Trinity and Greenwich Streets. Kushner and CIM purchased it for about $300 per square foot from Laurence Gluck’s Stellar Management and Savanna Real Estate Fund in June 2013. The bidder who offered $200 million reckons the property is worth about $430 per square foot.
JLL’s Richard Baxter, Jon Caplan, Scott Latham and Ron Cohen handled the previous sale of the property for Savanna and Gluck. None of the brokers was unavailable for comment, and CIA Group’s Raymond Cecora, who represented the Kushner/CIM partnership in their acquisition, said he was no longer involved with the property. A source familiar with the property said that the partnership had been entertaining offers briefly, but no longer. Another source working with a potential buyer, however, said that the partnership continues to be interested in selling the building.
Representatives for CIM and Kushner Companies declined to comment. In October, Kushner Companies CEO Jared Kushner told TRD that the partnership was considering converting some of the space into rental apartments and rehabbing some of the office space. Effective rents for late 2012 transactions at the building were in the high-$20s to l0w-$30s per square foot, but recent transactions in the building’s immediate neighborhood tend to be in the mid-to-high $30s per square foot, according to CompStak data. The median monthly rental listing price for a Financial District apartment in the second quarter of 2013 was $57 per square foot , according to StreetEasy.
Prominent tenants at the property include Studio Daniel Libeskind, the firm that designed the master plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
