Upper West Side’s Corner sells for $209M

The developers of the Corner, the popular Upper West Side rental tower that opened last year at 72nd Street and Broadway, have already cashed in, selling their 196-unit property to retirement system TIAA-CREF for $209 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The developers, a joint venture of Philips International and Rhodes Associates for the Corner, had spent more than 20 years assembling the prime development site and will hold onto the 48,000-square-foot retail space in the building, currently home to Trader Joe’s and Duane Reade. The sale price for the rest of the building — including its generous amenity spaces — works out to more than $1 million per unit, or around $1,400 per square foot, which is about double that of the typical rental apartment transaction, thanks to the Corner’s high rental rates: one-bedrooms there go for between $5,000 and $6,000 per month. The initial yield on the property for TIAA-CREF is between 4 and 5 percent, sources said, and while the company doesn’t plan to convert it to condominiums at the moment, a senior director there said he sees significant returns should the company decide to do that in the future. Darcy Stacom of CB Richard Ellis, who represented the sellers in the deal, called the Corner “the Seagram Building of residential apartment houses.” [WSJ]

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