NYC’s iconic Flatiron Building has sold for $190M
Photo by David Becker on Unsplash
New York City’s iconic Flatiron Building has sold for $190 million. During a live public auction in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday, Jacob Garlick of Abraham Trust placed the winning bid over one of the historic landmark’s previous owners, Jeffrey Gural of GFP Real Estate, as the Real Deal reported. Earlier this month, a judge approved a partition sale of the property to resolve a longstanding dispute among its owners.
The sale finally ends a long-running disagreement among the owners of the Flatiron Building, including GFP Real Estate, Newmark, Sorgente Group, ABS Real Estate Partners, and Nathan Silverstein.
In 2021, the four partners sued Silverstein, who owned 25 percent of the building, seeking a partition sale, claiming that Silverstein made poor business decisions for the building after its only tenant Macmillan Publishers moved out in 2019, as Crain’s New York reported.
Gural told Commercial Observer he offered to buy out Silverstein to avoid the auction.
“I offered him $25 million, on top of the mortgage, so I offered him the equivalent of $130 million,” Gural said.
The auction had 11 registered bidders, with the auction starting at $50 million and increasing in increments of $2 million before narrowing to $500,000 when Garlick and Gural were the only remaining bidders.
“If it wasn’t an iconic building, I would have stopped long ago,” Gural told CoStar News. “It’s such an iconic building and we own 75 percent. I really thought that it wasn’t worth anywhere near that but since we are only bidding on 25 percent, I felt I could overpay for 25 percent. On the other hand, we are selling for what I consider a very high price. We paid a very low price. The building needs $100 million of upgrades. It’s a lot. We’ve had a good run.”
Garlick now must pay 10 percent of the total bid price by the end of the day Friday, or it will go to the second highest bidder, who is able to decline. If they refuse, the building would be put back up for auction.
The Flatiron Building remains vacant. Garlick has not announced any definite plans for his future use of the building, but told CoStar, “we are going to make sure it stays one of New York’s most iconic buildings.”
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