World's Richest Man, Carlos Slim, Agrees to Buy 417 Fifth Ave
BusinessWeek reports: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim agreed to pay $140 million for 417 Fifth Ave., a midtown Manhattan office tower, from a partnership that includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a person familiar with the transaction said.
Slim, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s richest man, is paying $343 a square foot for the building, said the person, who asked not to be named because the deal is private. The 11- story tower is at the corner of East 38th Street.
The seller is a joint venture of Moinian Group, an investment company headed by developer Joseph Moinian, and Goldman Sachs’s Whitehall Street Real Estate Funds. The venture paid $250 million for the building in 2007, city records show.
“Typically we see high-profile new foreign buyers come in and make a trophy acquisition at a huge price,” Peter Slatin, editorial director at Real Capital Analytics Inc., a New York-based research firm that tracks property sales, said in an interview. “He’s not doing that. He’s not hanging a big sign on himself saying, ‘Price is no object.’”
The price is about half the $636 a square foot that SL Green Realty Corp. agreed last week to pay for another Midtown office building, 600 Lexington Ave. Sales are increasing in Manhattan after the credit crisis sent transactions down 87 percent last year from the average during 2004 to 2008, brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Inc. said in a report this week.
“The price really tells you the market is on a two-tier track,” Slatin said. The building at 600 Lexington is a block south of Citigroup Inc.’s headquarters at 399 Park Ave., where office rents are higher than south of 42nd Street.
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