Greystar eyes $250M for Chelsea apartments

One of the country’s biggest apartment landlords is testing the appetite for the kinds of high-end buildings that got hit hard when renters fled Manhattan at the height of the pandemic.

Greystar Real Estate Partners aims to sell its 18-story rental building at 160 West 24th Street in Chelsea with a price tag of about $250 million, sources told The Real Deal.

All 204 units in the building are market-rate, making the listing a test case of the market for unregulated apartments. Marketing materials for the property note that only six predominantly market-rate buildings of 100 units or more have traded over the last seven years, and that the 2019 rent laws that shut down the pipeline of deregulated apartments has further constricted the supply of free-market units.

A representative for Greystar Real Estate Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An Eastdil Secured team led by Gary Phillips and Will Silverman is marketing the property. A spokesperson for the brokers declined to comment.

Charleston-based Greystar, led by CEO Bob Faith, bought the 1989 building in 2016 for $211.3 million and renovated large parts of the property, including the lobby, a new amenity space and 70 percent of the apartments.

The fund manager is pitching the building as an asset that can attract renters who want to work from home or walk to work at nearby employers like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter.

The building hits the market as rentals have largely recovered from the depths of the pandemic, when tenants fled Manhattan apartments in neighborhoods like Chelsea, driving up vacancies.

Manhattan recorded 8,201 new leases in August, according to Miller Samuel. That’s an increase of 25 percent over August 2019 and 64 percent above last August of last year. The number of available apartments was down 68 percent from its peak in January of 25,883 units.