Kushner Cos. is selling a 49 percent stake in the retail portion of 666 Fifth Ave. to The Carlyle Group and Stanley Chera’s Crown Acquisitions for $525 million.
According to sources familiar with the deal, Kushner will continue to own 100 percent of the highly leveraged tower’s office space. In the future, sources said the owners of the retail space also will have the ability to lease some of the second-floor office space from Kushner and combine them with first-floor retail.
Jared Kushner-led Kushner Cos. bought 666 Fifth last year for a then-record $1.8 billion, and hoped to sell the retail component as a condominium.
To that end, Kushner had been negotiating with several players, and in an attempt to boost the space’s value already arranged to buy out the nearly 30,000 feet leased to Brooks Brothers, which was paying rents closer to $600 a square foot at a time when rents along that stretch of Fifth Avenue can hit four times that amount, brokers said.
Meanwhile, reports said Abercrombie & Fitch’s abercrombie division has signed on to lease the corner space of nearly 22,000 square feet on two levels for a “prototype flagship.” A&F already has a store at 720 Fifth Ave.
Brokers at Cushman & Wakefield still have about 12,000 square feet of retail space available plus another 6,000 square feet of support space for rent at the tower.
