Windows shopping: Nightingale offering SoHo building leased by Microsoft

Technically, it’s a chance to be Microsoft’s landlord.

Nightingale Properties, led by Elie Schwartz and Simon Singer, is offering the SoHo building it has leased entirely to the tech behemoth founded by Bill Gates.

Bids on the property, which features 63,000 square feet of office space atop 18,000 square feet of vacant retail space at 300 Lafayette Street, are expected to come in at $200 million — or about $2,444 a square foot, according to a report by the website Green Street. A Newmark team led by Brett Siegel and Evan Layne is handling the sale.

Microsoft signed a long-term lease on the building’s office space in 2019 — one that has 13 years remaining, according to the website. Design by CookFox Architects, the seven-story office tower on the south side of Houston Street features floor-to-ceiling windows on every floor and more than 10,000 square feet of outdoor terraces and greenspace.

The vacant retail space has 8,500 square feet at street level with a 40-foot ceiling and an additional 10,000 square feet below grade. Access to the Broadway-Lafayette Street subway station is located right outside the doors.

Marketing for the column-free building stresses its green attributes such as its energy-efficient lighting, windows and boilers. The building also features 11,000 square feet of landscaped terraces on floors three to six, a collaborative workspace on the second floor and a sixth-floor event space.

Nightingale partnered with Wafra Capital Partners to buy the leasehold interest for $125 million back in 2017 while the building was under construction, according to a report in the New York Post. That deal, brokered for Related Companies and LargaVista by Newmark, closed in 2019.

The building was originally developed by Related Companies and LargaVista under a long-term ground lease on land owned by LargaVista on top of the site of the former BP gas station. That land has fixed payments scheduled for the next 47 years, by which time much (if not all) of today’s technology will surely be outdated.

[Green Street] — Vince DiMiceli