UPDATED, 11:20 a.m., June 25: A subsidiary of Blackstone Group is putting another one of its office buildings near Bryant Park on the block.
EQ Office, an office landlord formerly known as Equity Office, hired Newmark Knight Frank to lead the sale effort for its 22-story, 350,000-square-foot property at 114 West 41st Street, sources told The Real Deal. Sources added the building has an unofficial asking price of about $300 million, or about $870 per square foot.
Newmark Knight Frank’s Jimmy Kuhn, David Colen and Edward “Woody” Maher are marketing the property on the behalf of the owner. A Blackstone spokesperson could not be immediately reached, and Newmark declined to comment.
EQ Office has owned the property since late 2014, when it paid $165.7 million to Leon Charney’s L.H. Charney & Associates. The building, located between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, is home to cloud-based commercial real estate startup VTS, Roku and digital health care startup ContextMedia:Health.
Blackstone, the private-equity giant led by Stephen Schwarzman, closed last month on the $640 million sale of 5 Bryant Park to Savanna, after a two-year off-and-one search for a buyer. The price per foot was $980. The firm also sold 3 Bryant Park to Ivanhoe Cambridge and Callahan Capital Properties for $2.2 billion, or about $1,000 a foot. Hong Kong’s central bank has since acquired a stake in that building.
EQ Office has been shifting its focus toward co-working, having recently partnered with Industrious to upgrade its buildings’ workspace areas. Besides the 41st Street building, EQ Office’s remaining New York holdings include Park Avenue Tower at 65 East 55th Street; 1740 Broadway; and 44 Wall Street.
Elsewhere in the area, Bank of China is in talks to pay $200 million for the land beneath 7 Bryant Park, for which it owns the leasehold.