135 W 50 St just sold for $8.5 million. That’s right – nine million dollars for a 23-story building in the heart of midtown Manhattan. That price dropped 98% since the last time it was sold!
This is actually a reasonably attractive building near the corner of 50th St and 6th Avenue. OK, it’s an office building, but knock out a few walls, and you have yourself a nice 23-story townhouse with a roomy million square feet of living space.
That’s right – a million.
That price is jaw-dropping. The bottom has fallen out of the commercial real estate market.
Contrast that to the residential market, where two million dollars buys you 1000 square feet.
I think the thing to do would be to treat each floor like a room in a 23 room mansion. You know, 6 bedrooms, a kitchen, the billiard room, the drawing room, the library, the trophy room, and so on, each would be one floor. Maybe some floors you could split, like making the music room and the trophy room both on one floor, or the kitchen and the dining room. But you’d want one whole floor for the ballroom, I think. And you would want several floors for storing food, water, fuel, etc., if the end times come. But your safe room could be a whole floor too. Yep, I think you definitely ought to look into this.
I wonder if it can have it’s own helipad on the roof? You’re going to want that too. Who wants to take the subway on a nice day?
All kidding aside, given the vast gulf between residential real estate values and commercial values, I think the building owners will probably study how that transition could be accomplished. I don’t know whether there is more profit potential in a few grand living spaces or hundreds of more affordable units. They currently have 35% of the space leased, so they can’t immediately convert, but they can probably create a temporary mixed-use solution while they create a long-term plan.
It seems to me that the land alone must be worth more than they paid for it, even if they tear down the entire building and start from scratch. The bank that sold it must have been losing a fortune every month if they were desperate enough to dump it for such an inconsequential offer. I wonder if they would have given it up for free if a major corporation had said, “Just sign it over to us. We’ll pick up all the debt and assume all the liabilities today.” (In fact, that’s pretty much what they did, because nine million dollars is chicken-feed in this context.)
No, no. Just ONE grand living space. There is no telling how long this new Gilded Age of free-range billionaires is going to last, and this is the time to build something to rival Versailles. “Millionaire’s Row” was demolished long ago, and NYC needs new personal temples of wealth. The place is there, and the time is now!
Definitely something for Trump to consider if he gets sentenced to home confinement.
The million square feet compares favorably to Versailles, which weighs in at a paltry 725,000 according to the interwebs.