Aside from its eye-popping $280 million price tag, mondo clothier Inditex’s impending purchase of a retail condo on Broadway in Soho will break the neighborhood’s retail record with a price tag of more than $20,000 per square foot.
The international fashion corporation, which is the parent company of Zara, signed a contract to pay $20,588 a foot for the 13,600-square-foot ground floor of a newly created retail condo at 503 Broadway.
News of the sale was first reported by the New York Post. The deal is expected to close Tuesday.
The space will be home to a Zara store, and includes an additional 27,588 square feet on the second floor and in the cellar.
The deal, negotiated on both sides by David Ash of Prince Realty Advisors, works out to a per-square-foot price that is more than a third larger than the previous record set a year ago.
In January 2014, Aurora Capital Associates paid $15,273 per square foot to purchase a 2,750 square-foot retail condo at 114 Prince Street for $42 million. That deal was negotiated by Eastdil Secured’s Adam Spies, Adam Doneger and Doug Harmon.
Of the Inditex deal, Ash said it was a complicated affair that first started out in 2011 with the company interested in a long-term lease.
During negotiations, he suggested building owner HSR Corp. consider creating a retail condo, which required Inditex to buy out tenant Old Navy’s lease that ran through 2018.
“Zara is a publicly traded entity that values its flagship retail locations in New York City and other major cities across the U.S.,” Ash said. “They’re not particularly purchasers of a lot of different condos, but when it came time to look at Soho . . . . This is such a unique space and fit. It made sense to dictate their own future. That’s why they were willing to pay the price they paid.”