Today in Relevant Real Estate News: way back in April, Crain’s New York reported that a certain “two story Bauhaus-style building” on Manhattan’s West Side had hit the market and that it would almost certainly sell for $100M or more. For context, said structure has served as the headquarters of one R/GA since 1984, aka “a time when the neighborhood resembled the gritty city depicted in the film Taxi Driver” and Rudolph Giuliani was but a humble U.S. District Attorney dreaming of the day that “a real rain would come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
This morning we learned that their predictions were correct: yesterday Sam Chang, “prolific hotelier” and buyer of real estate, dropped a cool $112M for the structure.
R/GA had been planning to move to a new HQ for some time, though we have no word on where its new home will be (CEO and founder Robert Greenberg bought the spot in the 80’s for a hell of a lot less than nine figures). In fact, we don’t even know how Chang plans to use the building–and neither does he.
The purchase comes with an option to expand the space to 300,000 feet; Chang says that it “might be a residential and hotel combination”, but it will definitely not play home base to another advertising agency.