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 3/29/12 5:42pm

Lease Beat

1700 Broadway

1700 Broadway Signs A String Of Deals

An ambitious plan to renovate 1700 Broadway and construct pre-built units in the roughly 630,000-square-foot office building has produced a string of leases at the property over the past year.

In a conversation with The Commercial Observer this afternoon, Jonathan Brundige, an executive at the Ruben Companies, the building’s landlord, and Peter Shimkin, a leasing broker at Newmark Knight Frank who handles deals at the property, estimate that about 115,000 square feet of space has been leased there over the past 10 months. Read More