Normandy Real Estate Partners and Ares Management landed a $55 million loan from Ladder Capital for its purchase of a roughly 138,000-square-foot Greenwich Village office building, sources told The Real Deal.
The partners closed Tuesday on the $101 million purchase of the six-story building at 797-799 Broadway, located at the corner of East 11th Street. They entered contract in May to buy the property from Cambridge Associates, which had owned it for more than 45 years, TRD reported.
Dustin Stolly
The building was constructed in 1853 as the St. Denis Hotel. It was perhaps most notable as the place where Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs after the Civil War and where Alexander Graham Bell gave his first New York demonstration of the telephone.
In the early 1920s, the hotel was converted into a Class B office building. It is now 98 percent occupied, sources said. The tenants are both medical offices and small-scale retailers such as an art gallery, hair salon and an acupuncture clinic.
Sources said real estate investment firm Normandy [TRData] and global alternative asset manager Ares plan to make strategic improvements, but haven’t determined what type yet.
A JLL team led by Dustin Stolly and Aaron Niedermayer brokered the financing.
Representatives for New Jersey-based Normandy and JLL declined to comment, while Ares could not be reached.