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Qatar's sovereign wealth fund has just acquired a prime piece of Manhattan real estate, paying more than $600M for a hotel on Central Park South.
The Qatar Investment Authority paid $622.9M to acquire the Park Lane Hotel, a 610-room, 442K SF property at 38 Central Park S, according to city property records. PincusCo first reported the transaction.
The Qatari fund acquired the building from a joint venture of New York developer Steve Witkoff and Mubadala Investment Co., an Abu Dhabi-state-owned investment vehicle. Witkoff bought the building for $654M in 2013, with the bulk of the equity coming from a fund controlled by disgraced Malaysian businessman Jho Low, PincusCo reported.
Low sold equity in the property to Mubadala in the years following, until the Department of Justice seized his remaining 38.6% stake in the hotel and eventually sold it to Mubadala in 2018 for $139.6M, per PincusCo.
Witkoff put the property up for sale in 2017 as a potential development play after initially looking to develop condos and a luxury hotel on the site, but no one met the $1B asking price, The Real Deal reported. The owners secured a $615M refinancing in 2019 from JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank.
It isn't clear if Witkoff still owns a stake in the hotel — the sale was executed through an entity transfer, rather than a traditional deed transfer, which was recorded in property records on Friday. The Qatar Investment Authority also took out a $400M mortgage on the property from Athene Annuity and Life Co., according to records filed with the city on Monday.
Witkoff has been involved in some of the most high-profile hospitality developments in the city in recent years. He is a partner on the Times Square Edition at 20 Times Square, which is the subject of a $750M foreclosure lawsuit. He also bought the twisting, two-tower, $2B XI project in Chelsea out of foreclosure for $900M after the collapse of HFZ Capital, along with Len Blavatnik, and the pair have resumed construction and rebranded it as One High Line.
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