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UPDATED, Nov. 29, 2022, 10:50 a.m.: What does the future hold for New York City office buildings? That’s the $64 million question — or, in the case of the past year’s 10 largest office sales, the $2.9 billion question.
Though some have pitched converting offices into housing, others have used the opportunity to purchase coveted properties at discounted prices.
The Real Deal analyzed office sales from Oct. 1, 2021, through October 2022, using New York City’s sales registry to determine the most expensive ones recorded over that period. Below are details on the top five, which totaled just over $2 billion.
The priciest was between ViacomCBS and Harbor Group International for 51 West 52nd Street, the 38-story tower known as Black Rock.
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Viacom sold the building for $760 million. In the 1960s, Viacom’s CBS headquarters set up shop in the building, which was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.
The building’s tenants include Viacom, which occupied 817,000 square feet, and law firms Orrick Herrington, Dorsey & Whitney and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
CBRE’s Darcy Stacom and Bill Shanahan brokered the deal for Viacom.
The second most expensive office deal was for 450 Park Avenue. SL Green purchased the 33-story building from Oxford Properties and Crown Acquisitions for $445 million in the summer.
SL Green got the building at a discount relative to the $545 million that Oxford Properties paid for the property in 2014. One academic study predicted office properties would lose 28 percent of their value by 2029 because of work-from-home.
Tenants in the Park Avenue building include international bank Banco Bradesco and a private equity firm BDT Capital Partners. The same two CBRE brokers and their colleague Doug Middleton handled the deal for Oxford Properties.
At No. 3, Boston Properties purchased 360 Park Avenue South from Empire Asset Management for an even $300 million. The same CBRE trio brokered the deal for Empire.
The Bank of New York Mellon provided a $220 million loan to Boston Properties for the 20-story, 470,000-square-foot building.
In the fourth priciest trade, Aby Rosen’s people/aby-rosen/ RFR Holding sold 95 Morton Street in the West Village to Meadow Partners for $288.2 million. RFR bought the eight-story, 154,000-square-foot building bacon in 2017 for $206 million.
Deutsche Pfandbriefbank provided Meadow with a $155 million loan for the purchase.
Rounding out the top five was a deal at 79 Fifth Avenue, in which Albert Kalimian of A&R Kalimian bought a 75 percent stake for $276.8 million.
The transaction at the 270,000-square-foot Flatiron building included Eagle Point Properties’ 25 percent stake and a 50 percent stake from the Kalimian family itself.
Kalimian took a $240 million loan from Citi, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase to help finance the purchase of the tower, which was built in 1904 and designed by Architect Albert S. Gottlieb.
Shortly after the April sale, Kalimian sued his nephew Justin Amirian, a principal at Eagle Point, for allegedly sending an email that accused him of fraudulent activity within his company.
This article has been updated with additional information on the tenants of 51 West 52nd Street.