NEW YORK CITY-The former Morgan Stanley hub at 750 Seventh Ave. has sold for $485 million to Fosterlane Management Corp., marking a return to the Manhattan marketplace for the offshore investor, Hines said late Wednesday afternoon. The 600,000-square-foot Midtown office tower traded for slightly more than $800 per square foot, about three times the rate Hines and an institutional equity partner paid in 2000 to buy it from Morgan Stanley.
GlobeSt.com reported last week that the 34-story asset, which was completed in 1989, was in contract. Vice chairmen Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan of CB Richard Ellis represented Hines in a marketing campaign that reportedly drew well over two dozen bidders.
“We are happy to have selected Fosterlane as the new owner of 750 Seventh,” Hines SVP Tommy Craig says in a release. “Together we share a 30-year history of successful real estate investment and development. Our success with this asset only further reinforces our confidence in New York City as the strongest real estate market in the US.”
Hines and Fosterlane, the Atlanta-based institutional real estate investment arm of the Kuwait Investment Authority, had collaborated in the late 1980s and early 1990s on a development portfolio that included 31 W. 52nd St. and the Lipstick Building at 885 Third Ave., both in Midtown, and 225 High Ridge Rd. in Stamford, CT. Fosterlane sold off largely all of its New York City assets, including the Lipstick Building, between 2004 and 2007.
Earlier this week, SL Green Realty Corp. figured in another nine-figure commercial deal in Midtown. The New York Post reported that the REIT and Jeff Sutton were paying about $135 million for the four-story, 15,000-square-foot 1552 Broadway, buying it from the Riese Organization. A TGI Friday’s currently operates in the landmarked property on the northeast corner of 46th Street; the Post cited unnamed sources in reporting that the restaurant is likely to be closed and the property will be put to “a use that no one has thought of.”
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