UPDATED Sept. 20, 2021, 3:30 p.m.: A George Comfort & Sons office campus in Westchester County is on the auction block.
The Manhattan-based office landlord’s four-building suburban office complex called the Centre at Purchase is scheduled to be sold in a UCC foreclosure auction at 2 p.m. Monday, Sept. 20, according to a public notice.
The company has owned the 42.6-acre property at 1, 2, 3, 4 Manhattanville Road in Harrison since buying it for $166 million in 2007, public records show. Rentable office space in the four buildings totals about 686,000 square feet, according to the company’s website.
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The landlord apparently defaulted on a $38 million mezzanine loan issued in 2017 by Cap Gap Lender, a Delaware limited liability company, which initiated the UCC foreclosure process. More information about the lender was not readily available, and the landlord did not immediately return a phone message requesting comment.
In addition to the mezzanine loan, the property has a $94 million senior mortgage issued by JPMorgan Chase in 2017.
At the onset of the pandemic, many businesses based in Manhattan looked into opening satellite offices closer to their employees’ homes. Westchester was said to be one of potential beneficiaries of the trend, but very few of those notions materialized, brokers say.
Still, Westchester’s office market in the second quarter saw a modest improvement as availability dropped 60 basis points from the first quarter to 22.5 percent, according to CBRE. Before the pandemic, the availability rate had finally fallen below 20 percent after developers replaced aging office buildings with medical centers and apartments amid rising demand for those uses.
Editor’s note: A judge issued a temporary injunction effective Monday, Sept. 20, postponing the auction at the request of George Comfort & Sons.