A&E Real Estate, one of New York’s biggest landlords, brought in Tennessee’s state pension fund to close on the $133.5 million purchase of a Sutton Place apartment building.
The $56 billion Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System entered a joint venture with Douglas Eisenberg and John Arrillaga Jr.’s A&E to buy 400 East 57th Street from SL Green Realty, a spokesperson for A&E said.
A&E went into contract on the 263-unit building in April, when the city’s rental market looked much different than now. It was only several weeks later that Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city planned to fully reopen by July and rental activity started to pick back up.
SL Green, meantime, is unloading one property after another to finance a stock-buyback program.
A&E’s Eisenberg said in an emailed statement that the $133.5 million purchase price was “reflective of a time of uncertainty.” The price works out to just shy of $400,000 per unit. Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance provided a $96.5 million loan.
The Tennessee fund owns real estate valued at $4.3 billion, according to its most recent report. That’s about 9 percent of its $52.6 billion of assets, slightly lower than its target real estate allocation of 10 percent.
SL Green hired an Ackman-Ziff team of Marc Sznajderman, Andrew Sasson and Chad Sinsheimer to market 400 East 57th Street, which the REIT acquired in 2011 as part of a seven-building it bought with Ofer Yardeni’s Stonehenge Properties.
The rent-stabilized multifamily market suffered a blow in 2019 when the state changed rent laws limiting the amount landlords could raise rents on regulated apartments. SL Green has since been selling its apartment holdings. A&E also bought another building from the REIT earlier this year, paying $62 million for 400 East 58th Street.