Yet another Midtown Sale

Murray Hill Properties is negotiating to buy a Midtown development site and plans a mixed-use office building.

Murray Hill Properties is negotiating to buy a Midtown development site and plans a mixed-use office building. That's on top of five pending trades we wrote about yesterday, including a mystery buy from Tribeca Associates. This morning, Tribeca Associates ID'd the building and gave details on its plans. More on that below. Industry fortune tellers have told us all year that sales would pick up in the second half of the year, and that's playing out. MHP's David Greene tells us hard assets will be the best investment opp for a good while, and he expects prices to continue to rise modestly. Meanwhile, investors have become more patient, reducing their expectations for returns (it used to be 12% to 15%) in favor of the latest mantra, "preserve capital." In David's words, NYC is both the safest big city on the planet ("Look around the world at the political atmosphere. Where do you think your money is safest right now?") and the center of the world ("Of course big capital is coming here").

MHP has been based in and investing in NY for more than 40 years and doing third-party brokerage for 24. Now, it has 40 brokers and owns, leases, and manages more than 6.5M SF. It's why we asked David to speak at Bisnow's 5th Annual NY State of the Market with other active NYC investors—World-Wide Group's David Lowenfeld, Himmel & Meringoff's Leslie Himmel, and L&L Holding president and chief investment officer Robert Lapidus—and big-time brokers—Avison Young's Art Mirante, Massey Knakal CEO Paul Massey, Colliers' Bob Freedman, and C&W's Bruce Mosler.

This morning, we braved Times Square during rush hour just to snap this for you of Tribeca Associates' new property, the Bush Tower on Broadway between Sixth and Broadway. The investor teamed with Meadow Partners to buy the leasehold interest in the 30-story tower—one of Midtown's first skyscrapers, built in 1918—from American Properties, using financing from Mesa West Capital. Their planned repositioning, including a two-story glass facade and a new lobby and elevators, will offer full-floor prebuilts to boutique office tenants, and it'll be rebranded as 130 W 42nd St.