Air-raising Highcap
Secures pricey High Line rights
IT might be a last gasp of a vanishing market, but a chunk of precious High Line district air rights has sold for a whopping $800 per buildable square foot. Highcap Group’s managing principal Josh Goldflam and Senior Director Michael Ferrara brokered the sale of 4,900 square feet of High Line Transfer Corridor air rights from 509-511 W. 27th St., owned by a local partnership, to development company Six Sigma for $3.92 million.
Six Sigma will use the rights to add height and size to 517-523 W. 29th St.
The company plans to replace a six-story warehouse with a 10-story, mid-block luxury condo project.
Six Sigma, which bought the site for $54.75 million late last year, filed demolition plans with the Buildings Department in August.
The air rights sale is notable because few chunks of usable air rights remain on the market in West Chelsea.
Ferrara said, “On the surface, $800 per buildable square foot may sound like a high price, but essentially this buildable square footage is going to be added to the top of the developer’s condominium project.”
The Real Deal recently reported an overall decline in Manhattan air rights sales volume.
The story quoted City Center Real Estate President Robert Shapiro that deals are still being done between $750 and $800 per square foot in the High Line area, but only “if you can find them — that’s the trick.”
Although three Shanghai-based private equity firms recently invested in the West 29th Street project for an undisclosed sum, according to China’s Mingtiandi news service, Six Sigma President Ja
son Lee clarified that it is not a partnership and his company remains the developer. The relentless march of WeWork shows no sign of taking a pause. The shared-workspace giant has just signed for three more floors at Charles S. Cohen’s 135 E. 57th St. at Lexington Avenue.
The 40,000-square-foot expansion brings WeWork’s total space in the tower to nearly 100,000 square feet.
The asking rent was in the high $70s per square foot.
Savitt Partners’ Schoen team repped WeWork. Cohen Brothers’ Marc
Horowitz repped the landlord in-house. Horowitz said the tower is now roughly 85 percent leased.
My colleague Lois Weiss recently reported that WeWork already has 1.87 million square feet of space across three boroughs of the city — with 25 Manhattan locations, four in Brooklyn and six in Queens — and it has plans to add many more.
Arcesium, a spinoff of DE Shaw, has outgrown the space it shares with the investment and technology firm on the fifth floor of Minskoff Equities’ 1166 Sixth Ave. Arcesium just signed a lease for 39,075 square feet all its own on the tower’s fourth floor.
The landlord was repped by JLL’s Paul Glickman, Cynthia Wasserberger, Jonathan Fanuzzi and Diana Biasotti. Arcesium was repped by CBRE’s Timothy Dempsey, Roger Griswold and Munish Viralam. The asking rent was $78 a square foot, according to JLL. The 1.7 million-squarefoot tower has about 120,000 square feet of space on the market via JLL. Minskoff is putting in capital improvements designed by Gensler architects to include a new lobby where signature art works by Roy Lichtenstein and others will be displayed.