Tall & Urban News

Gary Barnett’s Extell Development Company is selling off a parcel on West 54th Street, that is zoned for residential condominiums, Yoron Cohen of Colliers International, who is marketing the site, told Commercial Observer. The site shares the addresses 1710 Broadway and 211 West 54th Street.

In particular, Cohen believes the 288,000-square-foot (26,012 square-meter) zoned site at 211 West 54th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway is prime for pied-a-terres in the 600- to 1,000-square-foot (56-to-93-square-meter) range, with an average price of $2,800 per square foot ($30,139 per square meter). There are “a lot of large units [in the area], but [you] don’t have a lot of pied-a-terre units,” he said.

“We think the highest and best use in this point of the market is residential,” the broker said. “It could be commercial if it was in huge demand.” And because the plot is “irregular,” meaning not rectangular, it lends itself better to “a residential scheme,” he noted.

Cohen said that there is no asking price, but he expects the site to sell in the ballpark of US$200 million.

When Extell bought the site, it was bigger—more like 300,000 square feet (27,871 square meters) — and was part of a big assemblage on the block. It had an address of 1710 Broadway and was going to be a commercial building. Those plans have been abandoned, Cohen said, because Barnett couldn’t convince all of the property owners to sell their sites. So “now he’s going to break it up and sell it piecemeal,” Cohen said. Extell is retaining some of the air rights at 211 West 54th Street to apply to its other sites, rendering the plot smaller.

Colliers gave it a street address, he said, as that’s “more applicable for a residential building.”

There is an empty building at the site, which a buyer would demolish. Colliers’ executive summary calls for a residential building with retail at the base and a few office floors, but at the end of the day the buyer can do what he or she wants. A rendering of a potential building that could be constructed on the site was prepared for the sellers by PLP Architecture.

Barnett didn’t immediately respond with a comment.

For more on this story, go to The Commercial Observer.