The owners of an aging office building in Midtown are pitching it as a potential redevelopment play in the heart of Billionaires’ Row.
APF Properties is looking to sell its plot at 24 West 57th Street for north of $80 million, marketing materials show.
The block-through site between Fifth and Sixth avenues is currently home to a pair of office buildings facing West 57th and West 56th streets. But its real value is as a development site: The property holds about 140,000 square feet of buildable space as of right.
A buyer could also seek to acquire a site next door owned by Stefan Soloviev’s Solow Realty & Development and combine the two properties for an even larger project.
Representatives for APF Properties could not be reached for comment. Eastdil Secured is marketing the property; a spokesperson for the firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
APF Properties, founded in 1995 by Kenneth Aschendorf and Berndt Perl, purchased the site in 2006 for $69 million, property records show.
The site sits directly across the street from Solow’s 50-story office tower at 9 West 57th Street, meaning a new development would lack the park views that are major selling points for the corridor’s supertall skyscrapers, like Extell Development’s Central Park Tower or Vornado Realty Trust’s 220 Central Park South.
But more modest developments are moving in, looking to capitalize on the area’s rising cachet.
Rotem Rosen and his partners are developing a 180,000-square-foot condo project a few blocks east at 126 East 57th Street (https://therealdeal.com/2021/08/25/roten-rosem-plans-28-story-billionaires-row-condo- building/). The developers recently landed a $170 million construction loan (https://therealdeal.com/2022/12/02/rotem-rosen-lands-170m-construction-loan-for-billionaires-row-condo/) from Bank OZK and the project is expected to be completed in 2025.