SL Green to sell 600 Lexington for $305M

SL Green Realty is contract to sell its 300,000-square-foot office tower at 600 Lexington Avenue for $305 million to an unidentified U.S.-based insurance company.

The $1,005-per-square-foot deal is set to close in the first quarter of 2018, the Commercial Observer reported.

CBRE’s Darcy Stacom and Bill Shanahan represented SL Green in the negotiations. The deal was struck relatively quickly after the tower hit the market in October.

And earlier this week, SL Green announced it entered a contract to sell a 43 percent stake in the 57-story tower at 1515 Broadway to German investor Allianz Real Estate in a deal valuing the Times Square property at $1.95 billion. The pricing on that deal works out to $1,045 per square foot.

“Since the end of the summer, I’ve seen enormous pickup in sales activity [in Midtown],” SL Green CEO Marc Holliday told the CO. “Not just our two transactions, but all the other sales that have gone into contract in the past sixty days. The prices we’re seeing being achieved today are just as high or higher than what we’ve seen in the last 12 to 24 months. Global investors still have an enormous appetite for well-located Manhattan office.”

SL Green purchased 600 Lexington in a joint venture with the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board in 2010 for $193 million, or $636 per square foot. The real estate investment trust bought the pension board’s 45 percent stake in December 2015 for $284 million. [CO] – Rich Bockmann