Auction Set for Kushner’s Times Square Retail Property

The first signs of trouble for Kushner Companies’ investment in 229 West 43rd Street popped up in 2018, three years after the firm bought the six-floor retail portion for $296 million.

A deal with celebrity chef Todd English and Outstanding Hospitality Management to open a food hall fell through. Then two tourist attractions at the Times Square property began showing evidence of distress.

The operator of National Geographic Experience got into a rent dispute with Kushner that August, and Bloomberg reported that at least six contractors had sued the owners of another retail tenant, Gulliver’s Gate, for failing to pay.

The two tenants accounted for nearly half of the rent roll.

National Geographic brushed off its issue as a “garden-variety landlord-tenant dispute.” But a year later, lease defaults at the property necessitated a workout of Kushner’s $285 million CMBS loan on the property.

Covid arrived the year after that, and in March 2022 the Federal Reserve began its historic hiking of interest rates, rendering refinancing struggling properties all but impossible.

Kushner was never able to right its Times Square ship. Now, on May 29, the company’s unfortunate investment in 229 West 43rd is due to end with an auction of the retail site, Crain’s reported, citing a notice by bond-rating firm KBRA.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the firm didn’t buy the offices above, which served as the New York Times’ headquarters for decades until the newspaper moved to Eighth Avenue.

The office space is Columbia Property Trust’s problem — one it did not likely solve by signing declining media company BuzzFeed to a 110,000-square-foot lease in 2022. (BuzzFeed stock is now down to 39 cents a share.)

But that is little consolation to the lenders and investors who own the retail site’s debt, which in 2016 totaled $370 million.

Charles Kushner, the company’s patriarch, declined to comment.