From left: Steve Witkoff, Ruby Schron and the Woolworth building
An Israeli investor has signed a contract to buy the top 25 floors of the Woolworth building for about $70 million, Crain’s reported. The deal comes six weeks after reports first emerged that Steve Witkoff’s Witkoff Group and Ruby Schron’s Cammeby’s International were considering a sale of the upper portion of the property, which has remained vacant for years in advance of a residential or hotel conversion. [more]
From left: Steve Witkoff, Ruby Schron and the Woolworth building
The Witkoff Group and Cammeby’s International partnership that owns the historic Woolworth building is in talks to sell the property for as much as $500 million, the New York Post reported. Steve Witkoff and Ruby Schron’s companies joined forces to purchase the 59-story, 935,633-square-foot building, at 233 Broadway near Barclay Street, for $137.5 million in 1998. [more]
Steven Witkoff and 35 Star Island Drive in Miami
From the South Florida website: Steven Witkoff, the president and founder of the New York-based Witkoff Group, has sold his property at 35 Star Island Drive in Miami Beach for $8.5 million, according to Douglas Elliman Florida, which handled the deal.
The buyer was an undisclosed limited liability company. [more]
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]
The third annual GreenPearl New York event titled “Beyond Distress” was attended by over 450 real estate professionals. Witkoff Group Chairman Steve Witkoff delivered the keynote address, focusing on his acquisition of the International Toy Center at 1107 Broadway from Lehman Holdings. Mark Gorton, founder of Tower Research Capital, and the originator of Limewire — an early file-sharing program that resembled Napster — discussed the impact closing parts of Times Square to automobiles has had on businesses and the environment.
The event’s first panel, “Battlefield for New York,” included an impressive list of real estate experts, including Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of the retail group at Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Afterwards, Ryan Slack, the CEO of GreenPearlEvents, confided that attendance was down from the first year’s event — “The Distressed Real Estate Summit” — which attracted over 750 attendees. He speculated that the difference is probably due to the fact that a lot of those individuals are either out of the industry or have realized that the deals for forty cents on the dollar just never materialized. – Marc Becker [more]
Yitzhak Tessler, the 62-year-old CEO and president of Tessler Developments, spoke with The Real Deal in his first face-to-face interview since he started building in New York more than a decade ago.
The builder of projects such as 240 Park Avenue South decided to speak up, he said, to challenge the reporting surrounding 1107 Broadway, his failed condominium conversion of one of the International Toy Center buildings that became mired in the economic downturn and the Lehman Brothers Holdings bankruptcy. He was frustrated with the assertion that he defaulted on the Lehman Brothers loan, saying the story was more complicated. In the end, each side claimed the other owed it money.
In addition, Tessler answered questions about the Chetrit brothers, with whom he frequently partnered on deals, and his future development plans in Manhattan. [more]
Morgan Stanley, which just kicked off the sale of its mortgage servicing arm and partnered with the Witkoff Group at a Broadway condominium conversion project, borrowed $107.3 billion from the Federal Reserve in 2008, the most of any bank, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News using information released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, related court orders and an act of Congress.
An examination of the Fed’s emergency lending reveals how close Morgan Stanley came to bankruptcy because of a run on its prime brokerage, the unit that finances hedge funds’ trades, Bloomberg reported.
“Prime brokerage was presumed to be a pretty secure business, where the funding was not actually part of the liquidity of the bank,” said Frank Suozzo, president of advisory firm FXS Capital in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. [more]
The Witkoff Group, owner of one of the International Toy Center buildings located at 1107 Broadway, is joining forces with a Morgan Stanley real estate fund for a $290 million condominium conversion of the property featuring 145 units, the Wall Street Journal reported. The collaborators are still searching for a financing partner, but are expected to close the deal in the next month.
Witkoff acquired the 16-story, 350,000-square-foot property for $190 million in a one-day auction in June by seller Lehman Brothers. A number of high-profile bidders attended the event, including CIM and William Macklowe, SL Green Realty, and L&L Holdings.
Witkoff and Morgan Stanley anticipate spending $100 million to renovate the building, the Journal said. [more]
Landlord Steve Witkoff has failed to meet a deadline to file an appeal to a court decision barring him from increasing rents at Columbus 95, Crain’s reported, meaning that tenants in the rent-regulated apartments are free of rent hikes.
Witkoff had previously attempted to use a legal technicality to increase rents at the building, which was once part of the city’s Mitchell-Lama program.
Following the 2006 acquisition of Columbus 95, which is at 95 West 95th Street, for $68 million, the Witkoff Group applied for rent increases for 248 individual apartments, but the applications sat at the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal for more than a year. [more]
Anthony Malkin, president of Malkin Holdings, said that he learned in the recent process of retrofitting his company’s Empire State Building that it’s not about the greening.
“I think we learned that in the end it’s not about the greening but about money and about returns,” Malkin said at last night’s YJP Real Estate Investment Summit 2011 (see photos above). “If you put a green waterfall in your lobby it’s not going to change the world but if you can provide a greater than 40 percent reduction in the use of energy and save your tenants money by being efficient that makes a difference.” — Marc Becker [more]
