From left: David Schechtman, senior director of Eastern Consolidated’s Turnaround and Distressed Group, Christopher Okada, CEO of Okada & Company, and Adelaide Polsinelli, associate vice president of investments at Marcus & Millichap

Midtown West is quickly becoming a hub of commercial activity, brokers say, in anticipation of the Related Companies’ Hudson Yards development and thanks to new zoning regulations. “Eastern Consolidated, and I personally, have done a tremendous amount of work there,” said David Schechtman, senior director of Eastern Consolidated’s Turnaround and Distressed Group. “There’s a renewed interest in the neighborhood. It’s south of the already established Hell’s Kitchen and the gateway to Hudson Yards. There are big old buildings there that are ready to be repositioned — old, raw material that could be reshaped.”

As The Real Deal previously reported, Midtown West office building sales rose by more than 100 percent year-over-year in 2011, to $5.7 billion from $1.8 billion in 2010, according to Eastern Consolidated’s recent MetroGrid Report for Midtown West, released last week, which defines Midtown West as the area that extends from 30th to 59th streets, and Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River.  [more]

Midtown West office building sales rose by more than 100 percent year-over-year in 2011, to $5.7 billion from $1.8 billion in 2010, according to Eastern Consolidated’s MetroGrid Report for Midtown West, released today, which defines Midtown West as the area that extends from 30th to 59th streets, and Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River.

The concentration of overall new development in Midtown West has been unparalleled elsewhere in the city, the report shows, resulting in 35 new residential buildings, 14 new office buildings, 30 new hotels and 10 new retail buildings in the past year.

“Few would have believed that this area would be as viable as it has become,” said Peter Hauspurg, chairman and CEO of Eastern Consolidated. “To see the plethora of residential developments, office, hotels and restaurants is remarkable given that so many avoided this neighborhood 10 years ago.” – Katherine Clarke
[more]

Click image for larger version

From the February issue: The fourth-quarter market reports revealed that the recession’s worst-hit Manhattan neighborhood isn’t newly gentrifying Harlem or even the recently residential Financial District. Midtown — one of the city’s most well-established neighborhoods — saw the sharpest price decreases, the most price cuts and the longest days on the market. What happened? Experts say Midtown West, in particular, fell prey to a hotbed of speculation during the boom, fueled by an abundance of new condos, and the area is now paying the price. During the mid-aughts, thousands of new condo units were built in Midtown and quickly snatched up by investors eager to flip them for six-figure profits in the wildly escalating market of the time. Now, while overall market activity is on the rise again, falling prices have dampened demand from investors, leaving Midtown with an oversupply of condos — and absentee owners frantically trying to unload them. Around 42nd Street, “there are large, monolithic new development buildings, with a lot of investors and pied-à-terre buyers who are now desperate to sell,” explained Sofia Song, vice president of research at StreetEasy. [more]

Lower Manhattan
and Midtown West are each expected to gain at least 20 hotels over the
next two years, according to a Manhattan hotel report. The report said
that citywide, a total of 10,298 new hotel rooms could flood Manhattan
through
2011, including the Mark and the Double Tree Chelsea, which are
expected to open in the middle of this year; the Nolitan, which is
scheduled to open in 2010; and Trump Soho, expected to open this
September. Of the proposed 50 new hotels citywide, 18 are mid-scale, 22
are boutiques and just three are pitched as luxury hotels. TRD
[more]