Norges Bank buys stake in NYC office

Norway’s $975 billion sovereign wealth fund Norges Bank Real Estate Management has acquired a 48 percent stake in 375 Hudson St. in New York City from Trinity Church Wall Street and Hines, according to Reuters.

Norges Bank Real Estate Management paid $223 million for the stake in the 93-year ownership interest, valuing the property at $865 million.

375 Hudson St. is a 19-story class A office and retail building in Manhattan.

The building offers approximately 1.1 million square feet of rentable area in 17 floors of office space, plus prime ground-floor retail space, a gym and rooftop outdoor running track, 46,000 square feet of storage space, and a two-level, 100-space parking garage.

Currently, the office space is fully leased, anchored by Saatchi & Saatchi and Rokkan.

The Manhattan office market continued to build upon first quarter positive momentum as second quarter leasing reached nearly 7.8 million square feet, the highest level of quarterly leasing in two years, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

There were seven new leases above 100,000 square feet transacted in the second quarter, accounting for 12.4 percent of the 15.4 million square feet leased through the first half of the year.

New York City investment sales consideration and activity slowed markedly in the first half of 2017 compared with the first half of 2016, according to the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) Investment Sales Report. Year-over-year total consideration declined 39 percent to $18 billion, while the total number of transactions declined 6 percent to 2,419 in the first half of 2017.