NYC commercial sales rise in March, weaken over month

By Adam Pincus

Commercial sales in New York City rose to $4.2 billion in March compared with the prior month and also rose compared with March 2019, an analysis of city property records found.

The rise was driven by several large deals, including Amazon’s $978 million purchase of the former Lord & Taylor building at 424 Fifth Avenue from WeWork and Munich RE’s $900 million purchase of 330 Madison Avenue from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

The PincusCo analysis looked at commercial sales of $2 million and up on the date the transfer was recorded, not on the date of the sale.

The rise in sales comes even as the globe is battling the coronavirus, and investment sales brokers say most new dealmaking has been frozen. Virtually all the deals recorded in March were put in contract and most closed before the full impact of the pandemic began to hit the city, in the middle of the month.

The $4.2 billion in sales was far ahead of the $2.6 billion recorded in February 2020, and the $2.4 billion in March 2019.

The volume of sales has declined precipitously over the course of the last four weeks, however. The Amazon deal pushed the total for that week to $1.9 billion. But three weeks ago the total was $435 million, then it fell to $388 million and last week (including three days of April) there were just $192 million in sales, the lowest figure since one week in 2014, when it also reached $192 million.