Christopher Schlank and Nicholas Bienstock

Savanna liked 1375 Broadway so much that they bought it twice.

Back in 2010, Savanna purchased the property for $135 million and sold it to Westbrook Partners five years later for $310 million. But, in 2020, they were offered a second bite of the apple — this time at $435 million.

So, in February, when COVID-19 was a far-off, distant concern, Savanna went into contract to buy the 500,000-square-foot office building. There might have been plenty of reasons to bail, but Savanna held firm and closed over the summer, making it one of the biggest New York office purchases of 2020.

“At 98 percent occupancy with a roster of great tenants, the building has weathered the worst of COVID-19 extremely well and is positioned to thrive going forward,” Nicholas Bienstock said in an email. “Our view is that New York City has proven itself to be the deepest and most resilient market in the world through multiple crises.”

In addition to this buy, Savanna’s 50-person team has stayed focused on putting wellness and health measures in place throughout its 7 million-square-foot portfolio, nabbing $264 million in construction financing for their Downtown Brooklyn project at 141 Willoughby, and working with tenants.

“We are collecting about 90 percent of the rent,” Bienstock said. “We continue to provide selective relief to the ground-floor retail tenants in several of our office buildings.”

Plus, Savanna is “actively underwriting a number of distressed New York City deals and believe that there will be an opportunity in 2021 and early 2022 to buy great real estate out of that distress … We believe the distress opportunities will flow to those firms with operational capabilities, which allow them to acquire buildings caught by COVID mid-stream in the execution of their business plans, fix complex problems, complete the business plans, and deliver institutional-quality stabilized assets to the market.”

But Savanna is actually banking on something even more fun than that.

“NPR recently interviewed a historian of pandemics, who explained that … when a pandemic ends, people return to cities and go totally nuts,” Bienstock said. “They celebrate, they go to restaurants, they go to bars, they travel, they go to sporting events, they go to the theater and museums; they party and they spend like there is no tomorrow! Remember that the last pandemic in 1918-1919 was followed by the Roaring ‘20s.”—M.G.