Savanna is buying 5 Bryant Park from Blackstone for $640M

Midtown office tower has been on the market since 2016

5 Bryant Park, Jonathan Gray and Chris Schlank
5 Bryant Park, Jonathan Gray and Chris Schlank

Blackstone Group is selling another one of its trophy office towers along Bryant Park.

Savanna signed a contract late last week to acquire 5 Bryant Park, also known as 1065 Sixth Avenue, for $640 million, The Real Deal has learned.

Blackstone has been looking to sell the 34-story, 665,000-square-foot property since 2016, when the private-equity giant first put it on the market. The firm bought the building in 2006 as part of a $7.2 billion joint-venture takeover of Trizec Properties with Brookfield Property Partners. Blackstone then bought out Brookfield for $295.4 million in 2011.

The sale, which comes out to about $980 per square foot, would signal the last of Blackstone’s Bryant Park buildings. In 2015, it sold 3 Bryant Park to Ivanhoe Cambridge and Callahan Capital Properties for a whopping $2.2 billion. Hong Kong’s central bank has since taken a stake in that building.

The property at 5 Bryant Park, built in the late 1950s, is about 97 percent occupied, sources said. Tenants include Seamless, Movable Ink and HOK Architects.

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Sources said Savanna plans to hold the building for now, but may eventually redevelop it.

A JLL team led by Anthony Ledesma and an HFF team led by Andrew Scandalios are representing the seller in the deal.

A Blackstone spokesperson declined to comment, and representatives for JLL, HFF and Savanna could not be immediately reached.

Savanna, a private equity firm led by Chris Schlank and Nicholas Bienstock, has been aggressively buying office properties over the past year even as the market slowed. The firm picked up the Berkeley Building for $195 million and a Chelsea property at 31 West 27th Street for $126 million. Late last year, Savanna raised a nearly $600 million fund, its largest to date.

Blackstone, which took a stake in One Liberty Plaza late last year, recently promoted its real estate chief Jonathan Gray to president and COO of the private equity shop. His deputies Kathleen McCarthy and Kenneth Caplan were named co-heads of the company’s real estate division, which is the company’s largest by assets and generated roughly half its pretax profit last year.