The Swiss bank UBS and its brokers at JLL listed the 920,000-square-foot building at 135 West 50th Street for sale last month on the platform. The two-day auction kicked off on Monday with a starting bid of $7.5 million.
It’s an unusual place to try and sell such a large property. Online listing platforms like Ten-X have a reputation as places where sellers go to unload lower-quality middle market properties, not where major institutions go to sell big-time assets.
“We’ve worked with UBS before and we’ve worked with the broker before,” Ten-X president Steven Jacobs said in an interview earlier this month. “UBS’s perspective was, ‘We need to sell this quick, we’ve kind of made peace with this is gonna be a big loss. We need to sell it and we need to move on.”
UBS owns the property through a long-term leasehold, which hurt the value of the building, and Safehold owns the ground underneath the building. The 1960s-era Class A building is 35 percent occupied and recently underwent a $76 million renovation, according to the listing.
