Two and a half years after listing it for sale seeking a $700M-plus return, SL Green and Ivanhoé Cambridge are selling a Midtown Manhattan office property for tens of millions less than they hoped.
The joint venture is under contract to sell the 674K SF office condominium at 1745 Broadway to an institutional owner advised by Invesco Real Estate for $633M, SL Green announced Tuesday. The space is 100% leased, mostly to Random House, which renewed its 608K SF lease in the building in 2016.
In October 2015, the REIT retained JLL to market the property, expecting it to bring in "well north of $700M," Crain's New York Business reported at the time. In January 2017, the JV refinanced the property with a $375M loan from Bank of China.
"We determined that this was the right time to monetize our success with the property and redeploy that capital into more accretive investment opportunities, including our share repurchase program," SL Green co-Chief Investment Officer David Schonbraun said in a release.
Eastdil Secured brokered the ultimate sale of the building, which SL Green acquired a minority stake in as part of a $509M acquisition alongside Witkoff Group, according to The Real Deal. SL Green eventually bought out Witkoff, and sold a 43.1% share in the building to Ivanhoé.
The building's decline in price might have been a result of poor timing; in 2015, New York City investment sales hit record levels in pricing and volume, but those numbers dipped slightly in 2016 before plummeting last year. The market has since picked up, but, as experts have told Bisnow, that is more of a result of sellers being willing to drop their asking prices than any underlying change in investing conditions.
In addition to the Manhattan sale, from which SL Green will use the proceeds to buy back more of its shares from investors, a growingly common strategy among REITs in 2018, SL Green sold two office properties in Westchester County for a combined $67M. The properties comprise a combined eight buildings and 718K SF, and were sold to two different buyers in CBRE-brokered deals.
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