SL Green has put the office building 379 West Broadway up for sale according to sources.
The company, which is the city’s largest commercial landlord, has hired a Jones Lang LaSalle brokerage team led by executives Richard Baxter, Jon Caplan, Ron Cohen and Scott Latham to market and sell the property.
The building is roughly 70,000 square feet and is largely leased. Earlier this year, SL Green renewed the seven-story property’s largest tenant, the hedge fund and technology firm Two Sigma Investments, which occupies about 32,200 square feet on floors two through five.
Other tenants include the high-end residential brokerage firm Sotheby’s and the Omnicom-owned advertising firm TracyLocke. Ralph Lauren’s Soho store is a retail tenant at the property, which is located on West Broadway just north of Broome Street.
The offering comes as SL Green is in the process of selling another building in its roughly 23.2 million square foot city portfolio, the nearly 300,000 square foot, 18-story office property it owns at 19 West 44th Street. A CB Richard Ellis brokerage team led by Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan is handling that sale.
People familiar with SL Green’s investment decisions say that the company, after beginning as a firm that invested primarily in second-tier office buildings, has in recent years steadily looked to trade ancillary properties in order to recycle the proceeds into more prominent acquisitions.
By also leveraging its power to raise capital from the public markets, SL Green has emerged as perhaps the most active buyer in the city in recent months, scooping up the office buildings 600 Lexington Avenue and 125 Park Avenue, which together were among the biggest deals done this year.
Selling moderately sized buildings also may be a strategy geared to the current market, in which large buildings hundreds of millions of dollars in value have become harder to sell because of the tremendous amounts of equity necessary to finance them; the result of lending markets that have become more conservative since the downturn.
The source said that 19 West 44th Street could sell for around $100-$120 million, an size range that many real estate experts has become
379 West Broadway is the latest sales assignment won by Jones Lang LaSalle since it wooed the Baxter, Caplan, Cohen and Latham team away from the rival brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield earlier this year. The group is also handling the sale of 90 Fifth Avenue, a 140,000 square foot building owned by RFR Realty. A source said that the group is close to selling the 50,000 square foot Bryant Park office building 50 West 40th Street, a property currently fully occupied by the drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic, Daytop Village Inc., which will vacate the facility after the sale.
The source said that pricing for that deal is in the $500s per square foot even though the space will be empty, largely because it allows for the conversion of the property into a hotel or residential property.