From left: 475 Fifth Avenue, Darcy Stacom, vice chairman at CBRE and
William Shanahan, vice chairman at CBRE

Pension fund giant TIAA-CREF purchased the 280,000-square-foot office building 475 Fifth Avenue from Barclays Capital Real Estate this week for $144 million, about $4 million more than expected, according to sources involved in with the transaction.

The deal closed Wednesday, sources said, at sale price of about $514 per square foot. Midtown-based TIAA-CREF had been expected to buy the building, but for $140 million or less.

A joint venture of real estate developer Joseph Moinian and Westbrook Capital acquired 475 Fifth Avenue, located at 41st Street, in 2007 for $160 million, but lender Barclays took the property back in 2009 through a deed in lieu of foreclosure. In the slow commercial real estate market of the time, Barclays sought to unload the 86-year-old office tower for just $105 million. Comments

New York-based pension fund TIAA-CREF has bought control of the land beneath 425 Park Avenue for $315 million, according to city records. The land was previously owned by the Goelet family, a major New York landowner in the early 19th century, Real Estate Weekly reported.

The deal comes less than a week after the fund’s purchase of the Corner, the Upper West Side rental tower that opened last year at 72nd Street and Broadway, for $209 million.

At 425 Park, though, the fund will only have ownership of the land itself. [more]

The developers of the Corner, the popular Upper West Side rental tower that opened last year at 72nd Street and Broadway, have already cashed in, selling their 196-unit property to retirement system TIAA-CREF for $209 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The developers, a joint venture of Philips International and Rhodes Associates for the Corner, had spent more than 20 years assembling the prime development site and will hold onto the 48,000-square-foot retail space in the building, currently home to Trader Joe’s and Duane Reade. The sale price for the rest of the building — including its generous amenity spaces — works out to more than $1 million per unit, or around $1,400 per square foot, which is about double that of the typical rental apartment transaction, thanks to the Corner’s high rental rates: one-bedrooms there go for between $5,000 and $6,000 per month. [more]

From the May issue: It looks like sovereign wealth funds — which are made up of pools of money derived from a country’s reserve — are slowly returning to invest in commercial real estate in the United States.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, SWFs had decreased their investments in commercial real estate by at least 20 percent.

But the amount of money they’re investing now is substantial. By 2012, SWFs are expected to have $12 trillion in assets under management.

In one deal last month, the Qatari Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund for the tiny Middle East nation of Qatar, emerged as the backer for the largest downtown development under construction in the U.S. — a 10-acre project in Washington, D.C., called CityCenterDC, which broke ground in the first week of April. [more]

A growing number of New York City-based real estate firms are purchasing office buildings in the nation’s capital, according to Crain’s. The vacancy rate in Washington, D.C. is 11.2 percent — besting the national central business district average of 14.4 percent, and approaching Manhattan’s 10.5 percent rate. Meanwhile, leasing activity in Washington jumped 30 percent last year. As a result, Tishman Speyer, the Rockefeller Group, TF Cornerstone and TIAA-CREF have purchased office towers in Washington in recent months, and last month Rockrose Development Corp. spent $43 million for a 180,000-square-foot building at 1150 18th Street N.W. [more]

TIAA-CREF has sold a 49.99 percent stake in 685 Third Avenue to the Australian Future Fund Board of Guardians for $100.3 million, according to the Post. TIAA, which also transferred an additional 0.2 percent stake to an entity called 125 Unit Holders, bought the 31-story building from Pfizer for $190 million this past August and has been marketing around 612,000 square feet of office space for lease there through CB Richard Ellis in the months since. [more]

From left: TIAA-CREF’s 685 Third Avenue, GGP’s South Street Seaport, RREEF’s 15 Madison Square North

ProLogis, the Denver, Co.-based public REIT with 479.7 million square feet of industrial space globally, is the top U.S. commercial property owner, according to a new survey from Businessweek.com. Coming in a distant second was mall owner Simon Property Group, which has 264 million square feet. (Simon’s bankrupt rival, General Growth Properties, was ranked fifth with 200 million square feet). [more]

Before collateralized mortgage-backed securities, one of the best
sources of real estate mortgages came from insurance companies. The
Mortgage Bankers Association estimates that approximately $222 billion
in direct mortgage loans are held by life insurance companies maturing
through 2018. Earlier this month, Commercial Mortgage Alert noted that loan originations
by the 30 insurance organizations with the largest mortgage portfolios
plunged by 35 percent in 2009, to $36.7 billion from $56.8 billion last
year, according to its annual survey of lending by life insurers. The
report notes that the total value of outstanding loans by these 30 insurers
is $260.8 billion, a slight increase of 3.7 percent from the prior
year. [more]