Texas Family Revealed as Buyer of NYC Office Tower on Ten-X

A Texas family was the mystery buyer behind the $8.5 million purchase of the Manhattan office building listed on an online auction site, property records show.

The Thakkar family of Dallas-based Thakkar Developers snapped up the leasehold for the 925,000-square-foot tower at 135 West 50th Street for 97 percent less than the seller, Swiss bank UBS, paid in 2006.

Poorvesh Thakkar, CEO of Thakkar, declined to reveal the plans for the property, but said the firm is preparing a press release.

“We will give more details soon,” Thakkar said. “We will definitely do something creative — that much I can tell you right now.”

This will be the firm’s first real estate project outside of Texas, but Thakkar said the family has been traveling to New York for business for more than a decade. The family owns a tax planning business in McKinney, Texas. Thakkar’s website describes the firm as a development consultant, not a developer itself, and lists five projects, none bearing any resemblance to a Manhattan office building.

The family purchased the 23-story Midtown property under the entity TD 135 West 50 LLC. Veena Thakkar, Poorvesh’s mother, signed the ground lease. The substantial rent demanded by the lease helps account for the low sale price of the building, which in 2006 sold for $332.5 million.

UBS and its brokers at JLL listed the 920,000-square-foot building for sale on the online platform Ten-X. The two-day auction kicked off July 30 with a starting bid of $7.5 million and ended the next day after Ten-X lowered the reserve price.

It was an unusual way to sell such a building. Online auction platforms like Ten-X are often used by owners looking to unload lower-quality, middle-market properties, not where major institutions go to sell big-time assets.

UBS might have just been eager to wash its hands of the property rather than try to salvage more value from an aging building struggling to attract tenants, as are many similar properties in the city.

The loss on the building was minimally offset by a $6 million gain UBS realized by buying and selling the ground beneath it. UBS bought the ground in 2012 for $279 million, then sold it to ground-lease REIT Safehold in 2019 for $285 million. Safehold still owns the ground under the 1960s-era Class A building, which is 35 percent occupied and recently underwent a $76 million renovation.

After selling Safehold the land, which is a block west of Rockefeller Center, UBS signed a $221 million lease that expires in 2123. The $800,000 monthly payments will now be the responsibility of the Thakkars, who may choose to convert the dated office building to residences, reposition it for commercial tenants, or tear it down and build new.

Razing it would require clearing out the remaining tenants, which can be time consuming and expensive.

George Comfort & Sons, the brokerage for 135 West 50th Street, describes it as built in 1963 and having flexible floor plates of 12,000 to 63,000 square feet and “unparalleled amenities” including a tenant-exclusive 20,000-square-foot amenity center and a 35,000-square-foot co-working space operated by Industrious.

Ground-floor occupants include Singapore street food center Urban Hawker and Bobby Van’s Grill.