23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount | Hacker News Reader

23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount

nytimes.com

43 pointspaulpauper52 comments

What's notable here is that the discount is from a 2006 sale.

I've seen previous ~90% valuation declines but based on sales far more recent.

Chicago, 90% decline 2013 -- 2024: <https://www.chicagobusiness.com/commercial-real-estate/offic...>

San Francisco, 90% decline 2016 -- 2024: <https://sfist.com/2024/04/23/empty-office-building-at-sixth-...>

The impact of a 90% devaluation of the CMB (commercial mortgage-backed) securities market will have an immense impact on bank and investor balance sheets, which brings to mind the 2007-8 residential real estate crash and financial crisis.

Total present commercial mortgage valuation is about $3.6 trillion if I'm reading things correctly:

<https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1rCDW>

2006 was very close to the peak of the pre-2008 real estate bubble, so the inflated price makes sense. It would IMO have been more noteworthy had the purchase date been 2009-2014, because that's when the values were more "real".

Here's a better article covering this situation: https://wolfstreet.com/2024/08/01/values-of-old-office-tower...

Unsurprising that a building's value goes down over time while the land on which it resides appreciates. The 97% discount is a comparison of the building price versus the building + land price, so the 97% isn't very relevant.

Still pretty surprising. Buildings often go up in value over time and it's often the building that gets more appreciation than vacant lots. NYC is a special case, however, because land is so scarce in Manhattan. It's also frequently the case in NYC that different parties own the land than the building.

The building underwent a a $76M renovation in 2021. So, this is absolutely a huge loss in value.

Insane that building gets depreciated in the balance sheet

What is insane about that? Nothing lasts forever.

nah, its super normal in RE and the source of a lot of tax advantage

It sold for $8.5 million... ..."The auction was for the building itself, not the land. That is owned by a publicly traded real estate firm, which collects a monthly lease. But the rent from the building’s current tenants is not enough to cover those monthly payments, which are set to increase every five years and do not expire until 2123."

Correct. This is what was lost. Louis Rossmann I think made a somewhat knee jerk video about it.[0]

The company who owns the land is called "Safehold".[1] Rent seeking upon rent seeking. I'm surprised UBS also didn't sell the mineral rights to a fracking concern before they sold the land.

0. https://youtu.be/vpV1FS-gRZw

1. https://www.safeholdinc.com

There is no way in hell anyone would get an approval to frack anything in Manhattan of all places, and there isn’t really anything worth fracking under there anyways. Manhattan has never been a large source of mineral wealth.

Poe's law invoked.

fracking comment was tongue-in-cheek

Ick! That is a gross ownership model. Seems almost feudal to me.

Its not a gross ownership model. These things are set up this way because different groups of people will pay different amounts of money for different bundles of things that are taxed at different rates/advantages depending on their use. The land lease has scheduled payments for the next ~100 years, long beyond the time horizon of DCFAs that anyone is doing for investors. Many buildings in NYC and elsewhere have this ownership model. Why should a land owner be into construction and and why should a land owner be exposed to the volatility of commercial real estate rents if they don't need to be.

It is very common to have leasehold properties in Hawaii, usually larger buildings for residential purposes, but sometimes also single family homes and commercial buildings. Usually, they are owned by native organizations, which do not want to sell the land (for obvious reasons given their history) but want it to go to productive use.

It isn't a big deal here, and most locals support leaseholds because it allows the natives who had most of their land stolen to hold onto at least a bit of it, while still utilizing what little space they have on the islands.

Imagine that you own an empty lot. You could build something there yourself, but you don't want to bear the risk and manage it because you've never done it, and you don't have funds to do it. Why wouldn't you offer somebody else to do it for a fixed monthly fee?

On the other hand, imagine that you're a developer. You know how to build and sell, you've been in the business a long time and confident about your ability. But you don't have enough money to buy a piece of land AND build. Why wouldn't you rent land instead and then pocket the profits?

Kinda? I mean the name "landlord" directly traces back to the feudal era. The land owner could have a mortgage too in some cases and depends on that income to pay as well as taxes and insurance. The building owner is usually subleasing or selling subunits within the building so it's really just a tiered chain of ownership and leasing with various trade-offs in capital efficiency, risk, etc.

And literally called "Feu duty" in Scotland and only abolished in recent times (24 years ago).

Very common model in Germany as well, called Erbbaurecht. The land is usually owned by the Catholic Church or the city itself. They then give you a lease valid for 99 years and after that time the land falls back to them.

Interesting. So, it's like buying a house on leased land, which I see quite a bit of in Southern California as real estate values shot to the moon. Why would anyone buy an office building like this? Is the expectation that people will go back to office in the near future and the owners will be back in the profit on rent?

The area is zoned mixed use, so you could tear down and drop a mixed residence/hotel on it. Or redevelop the existing building into that use.

The Covid upshoot was WILD. Housing real-estate exploded, commercial stagnated, now the REPE firms are squirming to brake even.

Maybe this means HOPE can move back to Manhattan!

https://hope.net/

Who would buy a building like this without the land? How does it make sense?

Lots of people do. McDonald's franchise owners do the same, as do CVS pharmacies, iirc. It's for capital efficiency, and it especially makes sense in markets where the land is very expensive like Manhattan, or for a business that is trying to expand rapidly. Instead of borrowing (for illustration sake) $2 million to buy a lot and building, you can have another party buy the land for $1 million and then you only have to borrow $1 million to build the building. Your total debt is now $1M instead of $2M. You now have another $1M in lending power to go open a second location.

Why not lease the building, too? In the case of McDonald's I can imagine it's because only McDonald's wants the specific building (which looks and serves a purpose specifically like a McDonald's), but if it's a generic office building, why wouldn't you prefer to lease both the building and the land it's on (assuming you prefer to lease at all)?

When it's a generic office building, businesses frequently do lease them, unless they have so much free capital (like Apple, Facebook, etc) that they can build a custom building for themselves as a long-term HQ. But you're right with McDonald's and many franchises they have to build with a specific architecture style that's custom to their brand.

Property taxes in NYC are high enough that owning the land doesn't really save you much the way it does in most places.

This sounds like the leasehold concept in the UK.

If offices are shrinking, they can turn it into a residential building.

Property owners are terrified of this becoming a go-to strategy, particularly funds that might have investors breaking down their door to get it to happen ("Isn't some income better than no income?"). Residential units go for less, and even an inexpensive conversion is a capital investment of some order, so you're putting money into the building to devalue it. Alternatively, you could not do that, and your balance sheet survives to see another day. Who cares about pathologically inefficient use of existing infrastructure?

Right.

My first thought: find an all-but-vacant office building, build myself a sweet pad on my favorite floor, then go about slowly converting the rest into apartments/condos while reserving some floors for business - esp the ground floor.

Good luck convincing the city to rezone it

The 10 foot ceilings are too low for the modern renter's sensibilities, apparently.

That's... strange? I thought 8ft was standard for (non-"luxury") residential ceilings.

For many reasons this is very difficult and expensive.

Is it more difficult and expensive than finding new land on which to build new residential buildings in Manhattan?

No, because that is impossible since all the land is spoken for. But its so difficult and expensive that it is almost always uneconomical. i.e. you will never make the money back or the yield is so low might as well park it in bonds.

Archive / paywall: <https://archive.is/NpdIo>

Or maybe, just maybe, this is tax evasion?

I'm renting a cube (of sorts) in a building in Alexandria VA that sold for something like 30% of what the owners paid for it originally just the other month.

We're definitely witnessing a crash in US office space prices.

I never understood the argument that “locking in your losses is actually a form of tax evasion” - or am I misunderstanding what you are trying to say?

I don't really know how taxes work, but I'd imagine it's because somehow it lowers your tax bill for that year.

19h's comment that started this sub-thread is a perfect example of the horrible state of civics education.

I'm not an accountant and I definitely don't know taxes properly either, but I do know enough about taxes to know that businesses pay taxes on their net profit (gross income - losses = net profit). Those losses can be payroll costs, costs of goods, shipping and handling costs, rent, loan payments, insurance premiums, equipment purchases and upkeep, travel and lodging expenditures, and so on.

Assuming that the losses are legitimate and can be audited if necessary, this is not tax evasion and to baselessly accuse anyone of it is literally defamation.

The alleged tax avoider is in no way harmed by a kook on HN claiming illegal avoidance, so the elements of defamation are not met.

which is offset by the fact that you just lost a ton of money, so it doesn't really add up

Presumably you weren't planning to do that when you set it up. But sometimes people do lose money, particularly if they took a risk. If you take enough risks, you'll probably always have some losses ready to be realized.

Selling a NYC skyscraper for 97.5% under market value? Yeah, that's tax evasion 101.

Reasons:

- Property taxes? Tanked.

- Capital gains? What capital gains?

- Money laundering? Check.

- Gift tax dodge? Probably.

- Transfer tax? Lol.

- Asset value shenanigans? You bet.

IRS gonna love this one. Good luck explaining that "market rate" to the auditors.

Brilliant. I own some Bed Bath and Beyond stock. I was going to sell it for a ton of money, but now that the company is bankrupt, I can sell it for practically nothing and avoid taxes!

You probably can. You wouldn't have bought them strategically for that purpose of course.

Most people probably pick a mix of winners and losers. After you find out which ones were the losers, then I guess you can cash them in to lower your taxes strategically. I think that's the idea.

>- Property taxes? Tanked.

...depends on the jurisdiction. In many property taxes aren't based on the last transaction price, they're based on what the city assesses the prices as. Selling the property for $1 won't affect the value of the property, unless all the other buildings in the same area do the same thing.

>- Money laundering? Check.

Except property transfers are public information so it's obvious what's going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com