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CBS Entertainment is engaging real estate brokers to market for sale its vast broadcast center on the West Side of Manhattan.
The real estate play is still in early planning, CBS Entertainment President and CEO George Cheeks told staff in a memo, the New York Post reports.
CBS has been at the property on West 57th Street between 10th and 11th avenues since the 1950s. The building spans 600K SF, but CBS, which merged with Viacom in 2019 to form Paramount Global, is looking for a change.
After the Post reported via unnamed sources that CBS was eyeing a move from its longtime broadcast center last week, Cheeks confirmed the talks the following day in the memo.
“It is true that the company has retained a real estate consultant to evaluate selling the BC and to identify a new home for our teams there," Cheeks wrote, adding that any “potential sale, design and build of a new facility and an eventual move is very hard to predict.”
Three developers are said to have expressed interest in a deal, the Post reported.
Broadcast facilities in Manhattan have garnered big sales prices in recent years. In 2018, Silverstein paid $1.2B for the nine-building former ABC campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Last year, Extell Development reportedly paid more than $900M for the office portion of the campus.
Sales volumes in New York City commercial real estate have been particularly slow this year, however. During the first quarter, there were $2.2B worth of investment sales across 108 properties in New York City, marking a 59% decline from the trailing four-quarter average and a 53% decrease from the previous quarter, according to Avison Young.
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