A pair of century-old Midtown Manhattan office buildings are trading at a steep discount as lenders look to cut their losses, Bloomberg News reported. Empire Capital Holdings agreed to buy the properties at 229 W. 36th St. and 256 W. 38th St. for less than $50 million, or at least 68% below the roughly $157 million the buildings last sold for in 2017. 

The deal was a short sale for lender Investcorp, according to Bloomberg. Short sales have become more common as office values have plummeted, often below loan amounts. Last year, Empire Capital and a partner purchased a West 44th Street office building in a short sale.

Bloomberg reported that CBRE’s Doug Middleton and Jack Stillwagon are handling the sale. The buyer is considering either keeping the sites as offices or turning them into storage properties for now, a source told Bloomberg. Both properties also sit within a rezoning district.

Filling up the 900 shuttered Bed, Bath and Beyond stores will take some time. One retailer is doing its best to fill the void. Bob’s Discount Furniture will open a store this summer in Winston-Salem at 1020 Hanes Mall Boulevard. The Triad Business Journal reports Bob’s signed a 10-year lease earlier this month for 37,340 square feet in Hanes Point Shopping Center. The company will spend $500,000 on the renovations.

The retailer will also open five other North Carolina locations in former Bed Bath & Beyond stores in Durham, Cary, Fayetteville, Wilmington and Jacksonville.

The stores in North Carolina will be serviced by Bob’s existing distribution center infrastructure and third-party delivery relationships. Bob’s Discount Furniture has just under 200 stores across the nation, concentrated in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and West Coast regions. The closest store to North Carolina is in Chesapeake, Virginia.

Reade Hotel Capital paid $57.5 million for Embassy Suites Nashville at Vanderbilt, which the Nashville Business Journal reports is nearly $9 million less than what it sold for a decade ago.

The hotel, owned by investment trust Moody National Reit II Inc., is located at 1811 Broadway on 1.25 acres.

Moody National Reit II paid $66.3 million for the Embassy Suites in June 2015. With 208 rooms, the pending deal is equivalent to around $276,442 per room.

On its website, Reade Hotel Capital describes itself as a hotel investment company that targets the acquisition of first-class assets across the country. The firm owns two hotels in New York and one in New Orleans.

Downtown’s 1 Hotel and Embassy Suites sold to Host Hotels & Resorts Inc. for $530 million last year.

LIV Development paid $63.26 million for the Eastside Heights apartments. The Nashville Business Journal reports that’s about a million dollars less than the seller, Steadfast Cos. paid for the property in 2019.

The building, located near the East Bank, opened in 2017 and was co-developed by Southeast Ventures and Hardaway Construction. Eastside Heights stands five stories and offers 249 apartment units, 8,000 square feet of ground-level retail and a 360-space parking garage.

The transaction was equivalent to around $254,076 per unit.

LIV Development has developed more than 20,000 units, primarily in the southern region of the U.S. The firm currently owns two Nashville apartment complexes, Livano Nations and Livano Trinity, and sold another East Nashville apartment building, The Cleo, in 2018 for $66.98 million.

New England Investment Properties purchased the 342,162-square-foot 121 W. Trade Street building for $32 million. The Charlotte Business Journal reports that’s less than half what it previously sold for in 2015. Lincoln Property Co. acquired the tower for $71.6 million in late 2015 on behalf of a pension fund client.

CBRE’s Patric Gildea, Matt Smith and Robert Hardaway represented Lincoln.

The tower, built in 1990, sits on a .42-acre parcel at the intersection of Trade and Tryon streets. Its 121,950 square feet, 66% of which is leased.

121 W. Trade underwent renovations in 2017, updating the lobby, common corridors and restrooms. A new tenant hub was added with conference rooms, informal and formal meeting space and a 50-person training room. Improvements also included a tenant lounge.

The building is the longtime home of the Charlotte City Club, which has been located on the 31st and 32nd floors since 1990.

Boulder-based real estate investment and development firm Conscience Bay Company (CBC) completed the purchase of Industry Denver, located at 3001 Brighton Blvd, for $19 million. The 160,000-square-foot building will be rebranded as ‘Fabrica RiNo’. 

Conscience Bay Company purchased the property from Clarion Partners, who the Denver Business Journal reported had defaulted on two loans on the property valued at $28.67 million. CBRE represented the seller, and Conscience Bay Company was not represented. 

Originally built in the 1940s as a cold storage warehouse and later serving as the city’s primary food market, construction on the building to repurpose it for modern commercial use began in 2013. The building was one of the first major office developments in the RiNo Art District. 

The building offers private offices, common areas, and turnkey spaces ranging from 500 to 12,000 square feet. Over 20 companies currently call Fabrica RiNo home, including Core Power Yoga, Snooze and Will Call, encompassing nearly 4 acres of office and common spaces. 

Prime US REIT has unloaded One Town Center in Boca Raton, Florida, for $82 million, a considerable loss. The company paid $99.5 million for the property in 2021.

Prime US REIT sold the 200,858-square-foot office building and 435-space parking garage at One Town Center Road to Gatsby Enterprises. Wells Fargo Bank provided the buyer with a $51 million mortgage.

One Town Center was 99.7% leased. As of December 2023, it was valued at $84.8 million with a cap rate of 7%, compared to $90.3 million with a 6.25% cap rate a year earlier.

The 10-story office was built on the 9.9-acre site in 1990. It includes a fitness center, an on-site café, EV charging stations and on-site auto detail. It’s near the Town Center at Boca Raton mall and many restaurants.

Mesa Capital Partners has acquired a 282-unit apartment complex in West Midtown Atlanta. The company paid $70.5 million for The Mill at Westside, which was sold by Starlight Investments.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports that the property last sold for $72.5 million in November 2018. Mesa secured a nearly $39 million loan from Walker & Dunlop. The loan matures in July 2029.

Monthly rents for units at The Mill at Westside range from $1,486 to $2,412, and the square footage ranges from 632 to 1,396.

On its website, Mesa says it focuses on the identification of quality ground-up multifamily development investments and the opportunistic targeting of distressed, value-add multifamily assets in the primary, secondary and tertiary markets. Starlight says it focuses on servicing the U.S. middle-market household demographic in suburban areas with compelling population, economic and employment growth rates.

CBRE’s Capital Markets team in San Francisco arranged the sale of 410 Townsend St., a four-story, 78,000-square-foot office building in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) submarket. The property was formerly a hub for early-stage tech startups such as Eventbrite and Zendesk.

New York Life Real Estate Investors (NYLREI) and Bridgeton, a vertically integrated real estate investment firm, purchased the property for $22 million. The sale price represented a substantial discount on the nearly $86 million that Clarion Partners paid in 2019, according to published reports. NYLREI and Bridgeton were represented by Mike Taquino and Kyle Kovac of CBRE.

Although CBRE didn’t identify the seller, the San Francisco Business Times reported that Nationwide Life and Annuity Insurance Company, once the building’s lender, took ownership of 410 Townsend after Clarion handed over the property last December. By that time, occupancy had declined to around 25%.

“It’s our opinion that this is the start of the recovery for the San Francisco real estate market and 410 Townsend provides us with the opportunity to acquire a best-in-class creative brick and beam office asset well below replacement cost and where the asset traded in 2013 and 2019,” said Albert Pura, senior director of transactions for NYLREI.

Leaders From Rialto Capital Management, AEW, CIM, Rexford Industrial, EQR and Cushman & Wakefield come together on the Capital Markets panel at Connect Los Angeles 2024 on May 1 at the InterContinental in DTLA. Register now to hear from these industry experts and more.