UPDATED, 3:07 p.m., Sept. 24: German real estate investment firm GLL Real Estate Partners has paid Centurion Real Estate Partners $53 million for a parking garage in Battery Park City, city records filed today show. Goldman Sachs has a long-term lease on the 67,000-square-foot garage, records show.
The deal between GLL and Centurion closed on Sept. 12, records show. The 369-space garage is a block from the 43-story Goldman Sachs headquarters at 200 West Street. It’s located inside a 320-unit condominium tower at 1 River Terrace known as Riverhouse, One Rockefeller Park, where the average sale price is $1,206 per square foot, according to real estate website CityRealty.
GLL will maintain the space as a garage, given Goldman Sachs’ long-term lease, a company executive who requested anonymity told The Real Deal.
Executives at Centurion could not be reached by press time. Jones Lang LaSalle’s Jonathan Caplan was the sole broker on the deal, but wasn’t immediately available for comment.
Centurion had been brought in to turn the Riverhouse project around after the original developer Sheldrake Organization was removed by its partner Lehman Brothers, a person familiar with the transaction said.
Sheldrake executives were subsequently found guilty of fraud at the project after it submitted duplicate invoices to its lender.
In 2011, GLL paid Cerberus Capital Management $96.5 million for 4 Columbus Circle, a 135,000-square-foot office building at West 58th Street.
And in May 2012, GLL sold the retail condos at the base of the Jean Nouvel-designed building at 40 Mercer Street for $57.5 million to Midtown-based real estate investment firm Savanna, a 37 percent premium on what they paid for the retail asset in 2010, as The Real Deal reported.
Parking lots are big business in New York City, but developers see even greater value in them as potential development sites and will pay top dollar to acquire them. In May, for example, Miki Naftali’s Naftali Group bought a Hertz rental car garage on the Upper West Side for $55.5 million, well above the initial estimates of $45 million. The developer is planning an 18-story, 100,000-square-foot condo building at the 206-210 West 77th Street site.