By Al Barbarino 12/05/12 10:22am

Sales Beat

249 West 17th Street -- the former Siegel-Cooper warehouse

Savanna Pays $75.8M for Adjacent Chelsea Loft Buildings

New York-based real estate private equity and asset management firm Savanna has closed on its acquisition of two adjacent loft-style office buildings at 245 West 17th Street and 249 West 17th Street in Chelsea for $75.8 million, city records show.

Originally a dry goods warehouse and wagon house for the Siegel-Cooper Company department store, the property at 249 West 17th Street is a 145,000-square-foot, six-story building.  The other property, equal in square footage, is 12 stories high.

The two properties have a combined 40,000 square feet of office space and are located within a couple blocks of Chelsea Market, the Meatpacking District and Google’s 111 Eighth Avenue. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 8/15/12 3:57pm

Lease Beat

1251 Avenue of the Americas (photo courtesy of CoStar)

Rothschild North America Moves South Inside 1251 Avenue of the Americas

Rothschild North America, the North American division of English investment firm NM Rothschild & Sons, will be moving in to two new floors (and contiguous space) at 1251 Avenue of the Americas, the Mitsui Fudosan America-owned office tower.

The new space, on the 33rd and 34th floors, will total 69,418 square feet, as was first reported by The New York Post.  Rothschild North America currently occupies the 44th and 51st floors inside the 2.29 million square foot building, where it had been since 1994, according to CoStar data.  Read More

By Daniel Geiger 1/10/12 1:16pm

Lease of the Week

149 Fifth Avenue. (Courtesy Property Shark)

Risk Analyst Eurasia Group Calculates the Odds at 149 Fifth Avenue

When in 2006 the real estate investor Joseph Moinian bought the office building 475 Fifth Avenue in partnership with the firm Westbrook Partners, the Eurasia Group—a tenant in the building—saw it as an opportunity. The company had years left on its lease, but word quickly spread among tenants that Mr. Moinian was going to offer handsome buyouts to empty the building so he could gut renovate the skyscraper and re-lease it at sky-high rents.

Mr. Moinian’s strategy hardly seemed audacious at the time. The economy was hot, Manhattan rents were rising by the month and prime office space was in strong demand. Read More