Alex Sapir is buying out most of the stake his partner Gerard Guez owns in the trendy NoMo Soho hotel, which is valued at more than $246 million.
Sapir, who owns the 264-room hotel at 9 Crosby Street through his Tel Aviv-based Sapir Corp., paid an undisclosed figure to purchase Geuz’s 49-percent stake in the property, according to filings with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
The deal gives Sapir 99 percent ownership of the 26-story hotel, with Guez holding onto the remaining one percent. Financial disclosures from the stock exchange show the hotel was valued at the end of last year at $246.3 million.
The owners took out a $180 million mortgage from Column Financial when they purchased the property four years ago, according to property records.
Sapir and Guez couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
Sapir teamed up with Guez – a fashion industry executive and founder of the popular Buddha Bar nightclub – to buy the hotel from Deutsche Bank for $205 million in a foreclosure sale in 2014, when it was known as the Mondrian Soho.
Sapir, however, sought to oust Jason Kalisman’s Morgans Hotel Group as manager of the hotel and its swanky restaurant and bar, and staged a coup under the darkness of night in 2015.
While most of the guests were sleeping one night, Sapir slipped flyers under hotel room doors announcing the place would be renamed NoMo Soho, and tried to force out Morgans, which was in its third year of a 10-year management contract.
Kalisman fought back in court, but a judge ultimately ruled in Sapir’s favor. The new owners last spring launched a 1,100-square-foot penthouse suite on the hotel’s top floor.
The Sapir Corp., which recently changed its name from ASRR Capital, has been going through a bit of a shakeup over the past year. In 2017, several development partners in New York and Miami exited or dropped out, and former ASRR partner Rotem Rosen, Sapir’s brother-in-law, sold off his 80.5 percent stake in the company to Sapir. Rosen, who was recently spotted hanging out in Midtown with President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, walked away from the deal with a $70 million payout.
Sapir, who also runs the Sapir Organization, has been on something of a spending spree lately.
In March, he paid $17 million to buy a five-bedroom, 7,100-square-foot home on the Venetian Islands, the second-priciest sale for the stretch off the coast of Miami.
The Sapir Organization also recently joined Newmark Knight Frank in leading a $70 million funding round in flexible office space startup Knotel that valued the company at $500 million.