Meir Cohen and Ben Korman’s C&K Properties is refinancing their large development site just south of Billionaires’ Row through a loan from SL Green Realty, and insists that a report last week that identified them as being in default was inaccurate.
C&K Properties, which is shopping the site at 1710 Broadway at 54th Street and expects to fetch about $300 million for it, refinanced the property through a $45 million loan from SL Green in late May after its $32.5 million mortgage matured on the first of the month.
“It wasn’t immediately conveyed to us what the lender’s conditions would be to extend the loan,” C&K managing director Kevin Collins told The Real Deal. “There’s a very narrow window with a securitized loan when you can repay without a penalty. The discussion we attempted to have with the servicer really didn’t get going until well into that window.”
Collins said that once the securitized loan expired at the end of April it triggered a computer-generated report picked up by Trepp, a commercial real estate data firm, that identified the loan as being in default. Crain’s reported about C&K’s alleged default last week. But Collins told TRD that the property was on sound footing.
A Trepp analyst said the company’s system shows the loan is in a 180-day extension period that takes it through September.
C&K has owned the nearly 83,000-square-foot office building at 1710 Broadway since 2003, when they paid $23 million. Cohen and Korman are working to assemble some 115,000 square feet of air rights from neighboring parcels as they market the development site as the potential future home of a 1,000-foot-tall tower.