W Financial files $16.75M pre-foreclosure at Midtown West hotel

W Financial REIT filed a $16.75 million pre-foreclosure action yesterday against Paramdeep Singh and other alleged guarantors who own the hotel building at 129 West 46th Street in Midtown West, Manhattan. The lender filed the complaint in New York State Supreme Court.
Case LINK

According to the complaint, “The Borrower has defaulted under the Loan Documents by failing to make payments of amounts due under the Loan Documents, including, without limitation, the amounts due under the Loan Documents on December 1, 2023, and each and every month thereafter. The Borrower has also defaulted under Loan Documents by failing to provide certain documentation to Plaintiff as required by the Loan Reinstatement and Modification Agreement dated as of November 21, 2023.”

Court filings represent the position of one party and are not necessarily accurate or complete.

Paramdeep Singh through the entity Key Hotels, LLC paid Apple Core Hotels’s Kohane Remington LLC $24 million for the building on July 29, 2019, which was financed with the $16.75 million loan from W Financial REIT.

Singh refinanced a larger property in February 2023 that had been under threat of foreclosure, through a $44.5 million loan from Yellowstone Real Estate Investments.

The property

The hotel building in Midtown West has 27,250 square feet of built space and 10,391 square feet of additional air rights for a total buildable of 37,650 square feet according to a PincusCo analysis of city data. The parcel has frontage of 37 feet and is 100 feet deep with a total lot size of 3,765 square feet. The zoning is C6-5.5 which allows for up to 12 times floor area ratio (FAR) for commercial. The city-designated market value for the property in 2022 is $11.2 million.

Prior sales and revenue

This property was sold by Apple Core Hotels for $24 million to Paramdeep Singh on July 29, 2019.

The 27,250-square-foot property generated revenue of $4.5 million or $163 per square foot, according to the most recent income and expense figures.

Violations and lawsuits

According to city public data, the property has received two DOB violations, $6,280 in ECB penalties, and $7,800 in OATH penalties in the last year.

There were no lawsuits or bankruptcies filed against the property for the past 24 months.

The neighborhood

In Midtown West, The majority, or 75 percent of the 75.9 million square feet of commercial built space are office buildings, with hotel buildings next occupying 14 percent of the space. In sales, Midtown West has the 3rd highest sale turnover among other neighborhoods in the city with $2.6 billion in sales volume in the last two years. For development, Midtown West is the most active neighborhood among other neighborhoods. It had 27.9 million square feet of commercial and multi-family construction under development in the last two years, which represents 37 percent of the neighborhood’s built space.

The block

On this tax block, PincusCo has identified the owners of eight of the 15 commercial properties representing 2,104,439 square feet of the 2,167,128 square feet. The largest owner is Amarjit S. Bhalla, followed by Durst Organization and then Elo Equity. There are no active new building construction projects on this tax block.

The owner

The PincusCo database currently indicates that Paramdeep Singh owned at least two commercial properties in New York City with 127,928 square feet and a city-determined market value of $41.9 million. (Market value is typically about 50% of actual value.) The portfolio has $98.3 million in debt, with top three lenders as Yellowstone Real Estate Investments, Benefit Street Partners, and W Financial respectively. Within the portfolio, all identified are hotel properties. They are all located in Manhattan.

The owners according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development includes Paramdeep Singh, head officer and Rajni Rikh, site manager. The business entity is Key Hotels Llc.

The surrounding

Within a 400-foot radius of 131 West 46 Street, PincusCo identified five commercial real estate items of interests occurred over the past 24 months. One of those five items was a sale which Chartres Lodging Group bought the 113,969-square-foot, two-unit hotel (H1) on 126 West 46th Street for $49.5 million from Barings on October 12, 2022. Of those five items, four were loans above $5 million totaling $72.6 million. The most recent of the four was Tribeach Holdings in which borrowed $5.6 million from Arkview Capital secured by one condo unit in the 0-square-foot, 671-unit hotel (RH) on 145 West 47th Street on May 1, 2024.

Direct link to the property’s ACRIS page and link to DOB NOW portal.