Ohio teachers’ pension fund makes $432M investment in Hudson Yards

The Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group recapitalized a portion of their first Hudson Yards office tower with a $400 million-plus investment from the Ohio state teachers’ pension fund.

The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio paid $431.9 million to purchase a roughly 20 percent stake in the Coach-anchored 10 Hudson Yards, property records filed with the city Friday show.

A representative for STRS Ohio was not immediately available to comment, but a spokesperson for Related said the investment is “another vote of confidence” from an institutional investor in the Far West Side megaproject.

The pension plan joins German insurer Allianz and the Kuwait Investment Authority as an investor in the 52-story, 1.7 million-square-foot tower at the corner of 10th Avenue and West 30th Street.

Allianz paid $420 million in 2016 to buy the stake owned by Coach and a portion of the equity held by the Kuwait Investment Authority. The deal, which included a $1.2 billion refinancing of the property’s debt from Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, valued the tower at $2.15 billion.

The pension plan’s investment is the latest infusion of capital into the $25 billion, 17 million-square-foot Far West Side megaproject. The developers have tapped into myriad sources of capital to finance various stages of the project, as The Real Deal previously reported.
https://therealdeal.com/2016/08/24/inside-the-hudson-yards-financing-playbook/

And this is not the first time Related and the pension plan have teamed up. The two jointly own the ground lease on the 240,000-square-foot retail condominium at the base of Related’s 240-unit rental building at One Union Square South.

STRS Ohio also owns the retail condo at 15 Union Square West and 1 million-square-foot office building at 590 Madison Avenue.

10 Hudson Yards, the first of two office towers Related and Oxford built over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Far West Side rail tracks, opened in 2016 and is fully leased to tenants including L’Oréal USA, SAP, the Boston Consulting Group, VaynerMedia, Intersection and Sidewalk Labs.

Related and Oxford are also teaming up with Mitsui Fudosan America to develop two other office towers at the complex.