Brookfield puts $1.4B FiDi tower on the market

50-story office property One New York Plaza is co-owned by Chinese sovereign wealth fund

Brookfield's Bruce Flatt with One New York Plaza (Brookfield Properties)
Brookfield's Bruce Flatt with One New York Plaza (Brookfield Properties)

Brookfield Asset Management and China Investment Corporation are selling One New York Plaza, their 50-story office building in the Financial District, The Real Deal has learned.

The tower overlooking New York Harbor is 93 percent leased, according to an offering memo viewed by TRD. Its largest tenants are Morgan Stanley and the white-shoe law firm Fried Frank.

Brookfield declined to comment.

The investment giant gained control of the 50-year-old office tower in 2006 as part of its $9 billion acquisition of Trizec Properties. Since 2012, Brookfield has invested more than $230 million into the property, including rebuilding its retail concourse, repairing its facade and building out flex office space.

In 2016, Brookfield sold a 49 percent stake in One New York Plaza to China Investment Corporation, a Chinese sovereign wealth fund, and a 16 percent stake to Boston-based AEW Capital Management. Both deals valued the property at $1.4 billion. Brookfield retained a 35 percent stake and continues to manage the building.

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The owners refinanced the property late in 2020 with an $835 million loan originated by Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and BMO Harris Bank. The proceeds were used to replace a $750 million loan from Wells Fargo in 2016.

The 2.7 million-square-foot tower had seen almost 1.4 million square feet in leasing activity in the five years leading up to the refinancing, according to the documents associated with the deal.

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Eastdil Secured’s Gary Phillips and Will Silverman are marketing the property. The same team recently brokered the sale of the former Walt Disney Company-owned ABC campus on the Upper West Side to Gary Barnett’s Extell Development for $930 million.

A deal for the Financial District tower could provide insight into how investors are valuing Manhattan’s Class A office space. Only about 37 percent of New York-area workers went into the office in late March, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks card-swipe data. The average asking rent for Manhattan office space stood at $68.65 per square foot that month, following eight consecutive quarterly declines, according to Transwestern, a commercial property firm.

But one data point from March suggests the city’s higher-end buildings have retained much of their value: Brookfield sold a 49 percent stake in One Manhattan West to Blackstone in a deal that valued the 67-story office tower at close to $3 billion.