Flickr/Erik Drost When 685 Fifth Avenue hit the market two years ago, investors practically lined up around the block. The building’s roughly 25,000-square-foot retail space — which sits on the corner of 54th Street — came with 152 feet of frontage in the heart of Manhattan’s most profitable shopping district. Best of all, the property’s only retail tenant, Gucci, was about to leave, allowing any buyer to sign a new tenant in a neighborhood where asking rents were growing at an annual average of 8 percent. Who wouldn’t want to get in on that? Joseph Sitt’s Thor Equities and the shopping mall giant General Growth Properties, helmed by Sandeep Mathrani, certainly did. In July 2014, the two...
↧