JPMorgan is looking to sell a Plaza District office building for $270 million — roughly half of what it was asking for right before the pandemic hit five years ago.
The bank’s asset management arm put up for sale the 23-story building at 125 West 55th Street, known as Avenue of the Americas Plaza, The Real Deal has learned.
The asking price of $270 million is roughly half of the $550 million it was asking when it put the building up for sale in January of 2020.
The building is now about half empty, with the majority of vacant space concentrated in the upper floors, which command the highest rents.
“Given the obvious dearth of Class A office space in the Plaza District (let alone Manhattan), 125 West 55th Street offers an unmatched contiguous block that will certainly command a pricing premium in today’s market,” read an offering memo from Newmark, which is handling the sale process.
A spokesperson for J.P. Morgan Asset Management declined to comment. A Newmark team led by Adam Spies and Josh King is running the process.
The asking price for the roughly 587,000-square-foot building works out to about $450 per square foot.
JPMorgan paid $470 million for the 1980s-era building in 2013 from BXP (then known as Boston Properties), which had acquired it as part of the $3.9 billion deal to buy a portfolio of buildings previously owned by Harry Macklowe, including the General Motors Building.
Just a few weeks after JPMorgan put the property up for sale in early 2020, the first cases of Covid appeared in New York and the city went into shutdown. Many owners pulled their properties from the market and reassessed their plans.
In the meantime, the city’s office market has gone from doom and gloom to recovery. Early on, vacancies spiked and many questioned whether workers would ever return to the office like they had pre-pandemic.
Now, Manhattan’s office leasing activity is on track to record its best year since 2019. Still, with high interest rates and the costs associated with attracting new tenants, many buildings are still trading at discounts to previous valuations.
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