The Midtown South tech building at 158 W. 27th St. in Chelsea is now in contract for $82.5 million to George Comfort & Sons.
We hear the 118,000-square-foot building is being sold by Emmes, which purchased it just two years ago for $57 million.
It bought the building in 2012 from Himmel + Meringoff, which had already upgraded the infrastructure.
Emmes merely upgraded the Internet capacity and re-tenanted with tech renters like Peloton.
Asking rents in the property are now in the mid-$60s per square foot.
Emmes, which owns about 3 million square feet in the city, recently hired Douglas Harmon and Adam Spies of Eastdil Secured to market it quietly.
The deal is under a hard contract, sources said, and expected to close by Dec. 31.
In the tech-centric Flatiron District of Midtown South, current established tenant Knewton has expanded by 14,700 square feet to a total 31,000 square feet at 100-104 Fifth Ave., where rents are in the $80s to $90s per square foot.
Now on the full eighth floor of 16,300 feet, the education company has added 10,500 feet on the seventh floor as well as 4,200 feet on the higher-rent 20th floor, which has a desirable outdoor terrace.
Jim Wenk of JLL represented Knewton, which tailors its educational material to a student body that can include executives at corporations like Microsoft. Grant Greenspan of the Kaufman Organization represented the Clarion Partners ownership, which has spent $7.5 million on upgrades that include a Platinum rating from Wired NYC.
True Religion will move and soon consecrate the space previously occupied by Gap in Soho. The two-level space — consisting of 2,900 square feet of ground-level floor space plus 6,100 square feet of basement storage — at 513 Broadway is in the lively corridor between Spring and Broome streets where some retail rents are being stretched toward $800 per square foot for the ground floor.
The denim retailer is now at 132 Prince St. and expected to open in the new space by spring.
Brenda Wurtz of BW Retail Real Estate, along with Jason Pruger and Aaron Cukier of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank Retail, represented True Religion in the transaction.
Ariel Schuster of RKF represented the ownership.
The Gristedes-occupied space at 350 E. 86th St. between First and Second avenues is also on the market for redevelopment to a roughly 20-story tower. The owner is a private family.
With 125 feet of frontage along valuable East 86th Street and another 100 feet to the plot, the site could host as many as 154,000 buildable square feet with inclusionary housing and 128,500 without inclusionary housing.
But Richard Baxter of JLL, who is spearheading the offering with the capital markets team of Ron Cohen, Jon Caplan, Scott Latham, Glenn Tolchin and Stephen Shapiro, does not expect the likely buyer to have inclusionary housing due to the controversial “poor door.”
Pricing is expected to be $700 to $1,000 per buildable square foot, based on future condo sales in the $2,500- to $3,000-per-square-foot range for luxury buildings.
If a developer were to include affordable rental housing and the city insisted it be interspersed, it would severely reduce the value of the market-rate rentals. That’s because the market rentals would not be able to be sold as a block and/or converted to luxury condominiums that would end up privately owned.
But with contiguous lower floors, separate elevators, amenities and a lobby door, affordable rentals could be owned and managed by another company or nonprofit.
Political blustering and unrighteous indignation could nix getting thousands of newly built, clean and beautiful affordable units all over the city on line because of a lack of understanding of how the real estate industry, underwriting and market forces actually work.
