George Soros Puts Argonaut Building on the Market for Roughly $100M

Another Manhattan office building has hit the market.

This time it’s the landmarked Argonaut Building, an approximately 140,000-square-foot office and retail building at 224 West 57th Street in Midtown. George Soros’s Soros Fund Management has put the property up for sale and is seeking a price of roughly $100 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

The 1909-built building between Broadway and Seventh Avenue seems to be fully occupied by Soros’s grant-making group the Open Society Foundations, which moved into the building in 2013 and has a lease running through 2042. TD Bank is a retail tenant on the ground floor.

In April 2024, Soros, as a tenant, filed a foreclosure lawsuit against former landlord eretz group citing a default on a $145 million mortgage, The Real Deal reported at the time. Eretz had purchased the site for $213.8 million in 2015.

It’s unclear why Soros is now looking to offload the property after winning it in a foreclosure auction, but the billionaire plans to move his grant-making group from the building once a deal is closed, according to TRD, which first reported the listing news.

Newmark’s Adam Spies, Adam Doneger and Willis Robbins are marketing the building. 

An offering memo from the brokerage said the sale is a “rare opportunity” to reposition the historic building into “best-in-class residences,” TRD reported. The property has additional air rights that could give it a total buildable space of more than 200,000 square feet, according to the publication.

If an office-to-residential conversion does proceed at the West 57th Street building, it would join another conversion project nearby at 135 East 57th Street, where TF Cornerstone is turning the former office building into 350 apartments.

Newmark declined to comment, while a spokesperson for Open Society Foundations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.