Vornado Picks Up Center Building for $142M

Vornado Realty Trust, the New York-based equity real estate investment trust, announced this week that it had purchased the Center Building, an 8-story 437,000 square foot office building, located at 33-00 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, New York. Vornado acquired the building from Madison Marquette and Perella Weinberg, according to David Robinov, the managing director of sales at Ackman-Ziff Group, who represented the sellers along with Marc Warren, a managing director at the brokerage. The purchase price was $142 million, including the assumption of an existing $62 million 4.43% mortgage maturing in October 2018.

"Following the sale of a nearby building at over $300 per square foot, the ownership wisely took advantage of the increased demand for LIC buildings and engaged Ackman Ziff to recapitalize the Center Building, just two years after acquiring the asset," Robinov told GlobeSt.com. "There has been significant appreciation in Long Island City in the past few years," he explains. "The sellers were looking to capture and monetize the increase in the asset's value. We found very deep investor interest in this property, supporting the buyer's expectation that there will be growing demand from TAMI tenants for large floor plate buildings, and continued rental rate growth."

The Center Building is a multi-tenant combination use office property with ground floor retail and light industrial located on busy Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, borough of Queens, New York City. Located directly on the M&R subway lines and minutes to Midtown Manhattan, the eight-story office building consists of approximately 444,606 rentable square feet situated on 1.44 acre-site. The building was 98% leased at the time of sale with major tenants including Human Resources Administration, with 149,400 square feet, the New York City Transit Authority, which occupies 109,625 feet and New York Foundling Hospital, which leases 35,000 square feet.

For more news and information visit Blumberg Capital Partners.

DC's Southwest Waterfront Project Breaks Ground

The Wharf on Washington, D.C.'s Southwest Waterfront project developed by PN Hoffman and Madison Marquette, broke ground this week in a ceremony attended by Mayor Vincent Gray and three members of the D.C. Council. The groundbreaking was the District's biggest since CityCenterDC in April 2011, and landed three days into early voting for D.C.'s Democratic primary. The $1.5-billion Wharf project now beings Phase 1 of development, which covers 24 acres of land, more than 50 acres of waterfront, and a building area over 1.9 million GSF.

The Wharf, said Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells, will be "one of the most remarkable developments anywhere on the planet." David Brainerd of Madison Marquette called it "one of the most exciting development projects ever constructed in the city of Washington, D.C."

According to Stan Eckstut, Principal of EE&K a Perkins Eastman company, who is leading the project's design team, "We're proud to be helping return the city back to where it began, with mixed uses and high density all activating one of the world's premier maritime destinations. Designing The Wharf is about creating places where people want to live and visit, bringing the human scale to a large-scale development. It's pedestrian-oriented, water-oriented, and transit-oriented development all in one."

Set for completion in 2017, The Wharf will offer hundreds of new apartments and condos, high- end hotels, office space, a movie theater, restaurants, an Irish pub, a jazz club and a piano bar. A visual tour of the new Southwest Waterfront is available via the Washington Business Journal.

For more news and information visit Blumberg Capital Partners.