Brace yourself. We have some pitiful numbers for you.
So far this quarter—and the quarter ends on New Year’s Eve—only two Manhattan building transactions worth more than $90 million have occurred. Count them. Just takes two fingers.
No. 1: 1372 Broadway, which sold to Lloyd Goldman in October for $274 million. No. 2: 95 Morton Street, which private-equity firm Brickman picked up last week in a pre-Thanksgiving deal for $96.5 million.
It’s probably worth pointing out that 1372 only got done because the seller, Wachovia Bank, financed it.
According to Real Capital Analytics, Manhattan has seen only nine “office” space transactions of more than $2.5 million this quarter.
At the risk of inducing bitter reveries of good times past, the fourth quarter of 2007 saw 41 such transactions. Among them the Americas Tower at 1177 Sixth Avenue ($1 billion); the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway ($151 million); and the Helmsley Building at 230 Park Avenue ($1.15 billion).
When we asked Craig Evans, senior managing director at Colliers ABR, whether the miserable two-building number surprised him, he said, “No.”
“The debt market is locked up right now, and so no large loans can really get done,” Mr. Evans said. “That’s the problem.”
drubinstein@observer.com
