Aby Rosen’s RFR Holding and Signa Holding GmbH, Austria’s largest privately owned real estate company, agreed last week to purchase the Chrysler Building located near Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan for $151 million.
The sellers are Tishman Speyer 10% and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company 90%, The Real Deal first reported on Friday. The story of the sale was first published by the Wall Street Journal.
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Tishman Speyer real estate sold a 90 percent stake of the 90-years-old art deco skyscraper to Mubadala for $800 million in 2008.
The motive to sell the tower at such a huge loss was due to the soaring rent need to be paid to Cooper Union college, for the land under the building. The rent is rising from $7.75 million in 2018 to $32.5 million in 2019 to $41 million in 2028. However, current tenants in the building pay between $50 and $60 per square foot.
Another reason for the big loss is the cost of the upgrading of the building could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
According to Bloomberg, Aby Rosen said in an email that he would consider converting the 68-story tower into a hotel. Bloomberg also reported that Scott Rechler’s RXR Realty, whose bid lost to Rosen’s $151 million offer by just $1 million, had also considered a hotel to the 1930 tower as part of a mixed-used conversion.
Another interested party in the building was Ben Ashkenazy of Ashkenazy Acquisition company. According to the Real Deal, “the developer and his partner Michael Fuchs have made a career out of snagging architecturally and historically significant buildings, such as the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed Seagram Building at 375 Park Avenue, the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill-designed Lever House at 390 Park Avenue, and the Church Missions House at 281 Park Avenue South.”
