THE office building at 417 Fifth Ave. has quietly joined the meager list of city offerings.

There is no asking price for the 412,000 square foot building, but sources say it will likely get sold for somewhere between $175 million and $200 million — far less than the $250 million that Joseph Moinian and Goldman Sachs’ Whitehall Group paid for it in July 2007.

At that time, the partners plunked down $95 million in cash and took over a $125 million mortgage from Barclay’s Bank that matures in September 2010. That mortgage has since fallen into the hands of LaSalle Bank, city records show. There is also around $30 million due in a mezzanine loan from Credit Suisse.

According to Real Estate Alert, Cushman & Wakefield is selectively offering the building, and its capital markets team broker, Richard Baxter, was seen showing it yesterday afternoon. He didn’t return calls for comment.

To make a deal, sources say the partnership would pay off the current financing and a Goldman Sachs entity would then provide a five-year, floating-rate financing on the basis of 60 percent loan-to-value ratio.

That’s because obtaining even a $100 million mortgage is impossible in this credit market. Indeed, to date the government’s alphabet soup-filled rescue plans have yet to thaw lending to any significant level.

And those with other mortgages rolling will soon fret that they will have to take a haircut on a short sale or otherwise turn the keys over to the bank.

“Lending won’t bail out the guy who bought a building for $1,000 a foot and has an $800 million mortgage and the building is now worth $600 million,” said Robert Knakal, chairman of Massey Knakal.

The situation is even worse for the old-line city families who have owned a building for 40 years and refinanced cautiously — perhaps only taking a $250 million loan for a building that was worth $1 billion.

Now, the building may be worth $500 million and there is still a decent 50 percent loan-to-value ratio.

“But even if they are making payments every month, they don’t have anywhere to go to get a $250 million mortgage, and if it is a CMBS [commercial mortgage-backed securities] loan, they have no one to talk to,” said Knakal.

“Everybody is worried about it,” agreed Steve Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

The Real Estate Roundtable, a Washington-based, real-estate trade group, estimates maturing debt for each of the next three years at $300 billion to $600 billion, which after 2012 will then balloon to more than $4 trillion over the ensuing few years.

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Dice, the high-tech Internet employment firm, is expanding from 3 Park Ave. to the 15th floor of 1040 Avenue of the Americas.

“They are taking a more efficiently designed build- to-suit, 7,500 feet for 10 years,” said Billy Cohen of New mark Knight Frank, who repre sented the tenant with colleague Paul Ippolito, and led the team on behalf of the Wilf family owners.

“Clearly, the activity is skewed smaller — to 10,000 feet and under,” said Cohen of the current marketplace. [email protected]