SL Green pays $121M to Friedland for portion of fee under Vornado’s Crowne Plaza Times Square

SL Green Realty through the entity 1601 Broadway Owner LLC paid $121 million to Friedland Properties through the entity Walber Broadway LLC for an undisclosed portion of the fee under the mixed-use office, retail and hotel Crowne Plaza Times Square at 1601 Broadway in Times Square, Manhattan. Vornado Realty Trust owns the leasehold on the property.
The deal closed on September 24, 2021 and was recorded on September 30, 2021.
The property has 843,131 square feet of built space according to PincusCo analysis of city data.

The signatory for Friedland Properties was Lawrence N. Friedland. The signatory for SL Green Realty was Andrew S. Levine. The Real Deal reported on this transaction yesterday.

Friedland sold its fee position in the property. The property is ground leased through a lease that started in 1987 and according to a lease memorandum filed in 2010 would expire in 2027 but had options to extend as much as another 160 years.

Vornado Realty Trust is the ground lease owner, and borrowed $250 million in 2018. That $250 million note, reported to be reduced to $195 million, was sold to Argent Ventures.

Within a 400-foot radius of 1601 Broadway, PincusCo identified two commercial real estate items of interests occurred over the past 24 months.
Of those two items, two were loans above $5 million totaling $113.8 million. The most recent of the two was citizenM hotels and Brack Capital Real Estate which borrowed $65.8 million from JPMorgan Chase secured by the 84,577-square-foot, one-unit hotel (H3) on 218 West 50th Street on August 4, 2021.

Correction: This post was updated to reflect that SL Green bought Friedland’s stake in the fee, but that is not the entire fee position. 

Direct link to Acris document. link