Hilton Grand Vacations Pays $136M for Midtown Timeshares

The timeshare apartments at 12 East 48th Street are sufficiently nice that Hilton Grand Vacations bought them twice.

The Orlando-based timeshare company bought the remaining 111 hotel rooms at the Midtown building, dubbed the “Central at 5th,” for $136 million from Henry Silverman’s 54 Madison Partners, property records filed Wednesday show.

The purchase pencils out to $1.2 million per unit, or about $2,800 per square foot.

Hilton Grand Vacations, which spun off of parent company Hilton in 2017, has spent a total of $194 million acquiring property, following an initial $58 million deal for 50 units there in 2021.

“The Central at 5th is quickly becoming one of our most popular resorts,” said Gordon Gurnik, chief operating officer at Hilton Grand Vacations, adding that the company is “very optimistic about the future of tourism and hospitality in New York City.”

The company had been working on plans for a timeshare property with original developer Hidrock Properties, but 54 Madison, the project’s mezzanine lender, foreclosed and took ownership in 2020 after the pandemic brought travel to a standstill.

54 Madison, an affiliate of Jefferies Financial Group, did not return a request for comment.

The most recent purchase at the building by a timeshare client was for $122,000, good for one week per year at a “studio penthouse” unit in the building. Travelers can also book stays at the property without owning a timeshare.

A spate of recent hotel deals have evidenced both lingering distress from Covid as well as some latent strength in New York City’s hospitality market.

A shuttered Marriott with 655 keys recently fetched $153 million at 525 Lexington Avenue — a little more than half its 2015 purchase price of $270 million. Meanwhile, the Mr. C Seaport hotel sold for over $900,000 per room and Sixty Soho traded for a post-pandemic record of more than $1 million per key.

Shares of publicly traded Hilton Grand Vacations have recovered from the pandemic, closing Wednesday at $47 per share, up from a Covid-era low of $13.30 per share. The share price rivals its pre-pandemic peak in March 2018, but is down from its all-time high of $54.68 in November 2021.