From left: 104 West 40th Street and Savanna managing partners Chris Schlank and Nicholas Bienstock

David Tawfik’s Princeton International Properties has entered contract to purchase a Bryant Park office tower for less than $500 per foot. The deal is for the 220,000-square-foot Park House, at 104 West 40th Street, which was sold by Savanna for $105 million.

Savanna acquired the building about two years ago in an innovative deal that involved purchasing ING’s defaulted debt on the property for about $61.7 million, after a previous buyer paid $140 million for the tower in 2007. Savanna renovated the building and brought occupancy to 70 percent, according to the Post. [more]

From left: Citi Tower and Douglas Harmon of Eastdil Secured

The sale of Long Island City’s Citi Tower is expected to close today for a little over $500 million, the New York Post reported.

Sellers SL Green and JPMorgan squeezed more money out of the buyers, a group led by Brooklyn-based real estate investor David Werner, in order to extend the closing date on the tower, also known as One Court Square, which is the tallest building in Queens, the Post said. [more]

From top: SL Green CEO Marc Holliday, Douglas Harmon and Adam Spies of Eastdil Secured and 521 Fifth Avenue (right)

Fourteen months after acquiring the remaining stake in 521 Fifth Avenue, SL Green Realty has tapped Eastdil Secured brokers to shop a large portion of the building for nearly $700 per square foot.

The New York Post reported that Eastdil’s Douglas Harmon and Adam Spies are marketing a 49 percent to 80 percent stake in the 510,000-square-foot tower at the corner of East 43rd Street. SL Green acquired the remaining 49.9 percent interest in the 39-story office tower last January from City Investment Fund, with whom it purchased the building in 2006. SL Green said at the time the deal valued the building at $245.7 million. [more]

Larry Gluck’s Stellar Management has finalized a plan to partner with tenant Erez Shternlicht and replace a loading dock in Gluck’s Meatpacking District office building at 450 West 15th Street with a prime retail storefront.

The retail addition, that will sit just west of luxury clothing retailer Jeffrey New York on West 14th Street between Ninth and 10th avenues, is part of a larger approximately $60 million sale and lease transaction Milk Studio’s Shternlicht executed in two separate deals including the sale of the neighboring Mobil gas station.

Shternlicht said the extremely complicated deals would unlock millions of dollars in value for the Stellar Management building and influence the area by adding retail on 14th Street all the way to 10th Avenue. … [more]

Normandy Real Estate Partners has gone into contract to purchase a 275,000-square-foot, 16-story office building at 1370 Broadway and 37th Street for $125 million, according to the New York Post. Sources said the building was snapped up by the company just before Thanksgiving.

As The Real Deal previously reported, the seller, Sitt Asset Management, had been soliciting bids for the building in October. CoStar Group data shows the property has about 22 percent of its space available to lease. Large tenants there include apparel retailer Esprit and executive office firm Jay Suites…. [more]

From left: Adam Spies, Robert Knakal, Woody Heller, Richard Baxter and Harry Krausman

Sources: CoStar Group, PropertyShark.com and The Real Deal.
Footnotes: Sales data is for Manhattan deals published on the city property record site Acris in September and provided by PropertyShark.com. Brokers and additional information is from CoStar Group and The Real Deal.

The top commercial deal to be recorded in city property records in September
was JPMorgan Chase Asset Management closing on the $719 million acquisition of the 14-story office and commercial building
200 Fifth Avenue, (part of the former International Toy Center buildings),
PropertyShark.com data shows. Eastdil Secured’s Adam Spies and Douglas
Harmon brokered the sale (see chart above). The purchase drove much of the
monthly total transfer value, which was $2.9 billion in commercial deals reported
on the city property record site Acris, an analysis of PropertyShark.com figures
show…. [more]

From left: Steve Witkoff, founder of the Witkoff Group, 1107 Broadway, Yitzhak Tessler of Tessler Developments and Eastdil Secured’s Adam Spies and Douglas Harmon

Steve Witkoff’s Witkoff Group has completed its purchase of part of the former International Toy Center building from Lehman Brothers Holdings for $191 million, Lehman announced yesterday, following a bankruptcy auction by Eastdil Secured in June. Witkoff is planning a $290 million condominium conversion of the property, at 1107 Broadway, featuring 145 units, in collaboration with a Morgan Stanley real estate fund.

Eastdil Secured brokers Adam Spies and Doug Harmon represented the seller in the deal, and brought the buyer and seller together.

The closing of the 16-story office building follows the sale of 200 Fifth Avenue earlier this month, which was previously the main Toy Center building, for $726 million. … [more]

A partnership of Joseph Chetrit, Yair Levy and Charles Dayan is looking to unload 620 Sixth Avenue, and according to the Observer, the nearly 800,000-square-foot mammoth anchored by Bed Bath & Beyond could fetch around $500 million in a sale. The landlords purchased the Chelsea property for $289.8 million in 2005, taking out a $235 million mortgage that they nearly defaulted on in the years following. But if recent blockbuster sales in the area are any indication ($900 million for the Starrett-Lehigh Building and $2 billion for 111 Eighth Avenue), it looks like they have a good chance of cashing in. For a buyer, the building appears to have significant upside, to boot. There are 250,000 square feet of additional development rights atop the existing structure, plus 75,000 square feet at an adjacent site that is zoned to allow for hotel development. … [more]

Google signed a contract yesterday to buy its 111 Eighth Avenue New York City home for $1.8 billion in the largest commercial real estate purchase by a tenant in U.S. history, according to the Post. The company put down “serious money,” though not a full 10 percent deposit, accordng to sources. Google currently has 500,000 square feet of the 3 million-square-foot property between 15th and 16th streets, where Nike WebMD and Sprint also reside, but is said to be planning to “gobble up the [other current tenants'] space like Pac-Man,” when their leases are up, as one source put it. … [more]

Google is nearing a deal to buy its massive 111 Eighth Avenue home — one of the largest buildings in Manhattan — for close to its striking $2 billion asking price, the Post reported. The company currently leases more than 550,000 square feet in the 18-story Chelsea trophy and has already made known its plans to expand in New York City. The former industrial property, whose tenants now also include Nike, WebMD and Sprint, contains 2.9 million square feet of space, putting the rumored price tag at around $690 per square foot. But unsurprisingly, Google isn’t the only one angling for control of the asset, which Taconic Partners, Jamestown and the New York State Common Retirement Fund put on the market last month with Douglas Harmon of Eastdil Secured. Local families, real estate investment trusts, sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and Asia as well as entities from Beijing, Singapore, Chile, Argentina and Israel are among the others said to be interesting in bidding on the property. [Post]

… [more]