The sale of the strategically placed boutique office building that once housed the Playboy Club at 5 E. 59th St. was completed on Friday to GreenOak along with Daniel Ghadamian and Josh Zamir’s Capstone Equities for $85 million.
The Brazil-based Groupo Victor Malzoni, led by billionaire investor Paulo Malzoni, hired Louis Puopolo of Douglas Elliman to market the building. Puopolo said all the office floors will be vacant by the end of the year and the retail, occupied by the Northern Italian restaurant Bottega Del Vino, shortly thereafter.
The 47,000-square-foot rentable building, plus air rights for 22,000 feet, pencils out to $1,411 a foot for its 60,240 square feet of buildable space. The building is next to Crate & Barrel and across East 59th Street from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store. Cartier is also doing so well in its temp home, sources say it may remain there as a second location after the retailer moves back to its flagship digs.
The 59th Street building will undergo a complete transformation to target a high-end retailer that may also use the office space. Any capital improvement program would also likely swap the black glass façade for more transparency.
Locally, GreenOak is an investor in numerous buildings that include 425 Park Ave. and 285 Madison — where it just relocated its offices — and real estate investment platform RealConnex.com.
CEO Roy Abrams founded the RealConnex site after being shut out of investing in the insular Miami market. Today, he says, his “target is to be the largest aggregation of real estate professionals” so they can interact, buy, sell, invest, find investors for equity and debt and showcase their services and capabilities.
The website will verify member information and allow members to selectively shield data — yet later reveal bits and pieces to specific members as deals move forward. Abrams said they have also created “touch points” for folks to interact both online and off-line.
“We find that right now, people still want to meet the sponsor — then they are happy to continue with the deal online,” Abrams said. “They still want to look at the whites of the eyes and feel the chemistry.”
With millennials glued to their screens and online real estate tech tentacles grabbing page views and dollars, Abrams has already raised $5.5 million. He will leave the site in beta mode this week so Between the Bricks readers can register and check it out for free. A more robust site will relaunch later this summer. Fees are not yet set but expected to start around $99 a month with up-charges for hand-holding concierge services during deals.
Republic Clothing Group is moving to 50,522 square feet at 1411 Broadway in a sublease of the 36th and 37th floors from Nine West Holdings, which will still have nearly 400,000 square feet in the building owned by Ivanhoé Cambridge.
Let by Michael Warner and David Warner, Republic encompasses brands that include Joan Vass New York, Grace Elements and The Carmen by Carmen Marc Valvo that is carried by Neiman Marcus. The company is now at 1440 Broadway in 59,000 square feet and will move by the end of the year.
Republic was represented by Brian Waterman, Lance Korman and Brent Ozarowski of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. The sublease runs into 2027 and the spectacular floors have 360-degree views down to One World Trade Center.
JLL’s Frank Doyle, Amanda Bokman, David Kleiner and Clark Finney represented Nine West.
Paul Amrich leads the CBRE team that represented Ivanhoé Cambridge’s Callahan Capital operating division, which is repositioning the building and new lobby.
Republic, NGKF, JLL and CBRE could not be reached for comment.
High-floor asking rents in the building are in the upper $70s per square foot, and this is a huge jump for the Times Square South corridor, where it wasn’t long ago that jaws dropped at asking rents in the $40s per square foot. No wonder there have been numerous trades and building infrastructure investments made between West 42nd and 34th streets.
The Bay Terrace shopping center in Queens is getting a new HomeGoods. The TJX-owned division will move into 17,556 square feet that will be built out at the Cord Meyer-owned center at 23-80
Bell Blvd. at 26th Avenue.
HomeGoods will open by 2016 and the 10-year lease has three five-year extensions, documents show. Neither company returned calls for comment.
