Tishman Building is yet again up for sale
The former National Fuel Gas Co. headquarters building in downtown Buffalo is up for sale . . . again.
Lillian Goldman Family LLC is selling the the Tishman Building, a nearly vacant 20-story, 198,000- square-foot structure located on Lafayette Square in the 400 block of Main Street. The New York Citybased investors have long owned the land on which the tower is located, but only recently regained ownership of the building itself.
Chuck Clark, of the Buffalo office of CB Richard Ellis, said the sale will be conducted via a sealed bid auction, and no minimum price has been set.
“The market is going to tell us what that number is,” Clark said. “We just launched the sale effort on [Jan. 6] and there has already been several requests for bid packets.”
Early interest has come from both local and out-of-town groups. The City of Buffalo’s current assessed value of the building is listed as $2 million.
Nearly empty since National Fuel departed for Williamsville in mid-2003, the structure was under the control of 10 LS Realty LLC from October 2005 through last fall. That Brooklyn-based investment group, which paid just under $1 million for the building, floundered in its attempts to attract tenants, and began putting “for sale” ads on various Internet real estates sites for as much as $3.9 million in 2006.
Last April, 10 LS Realty briefly offered it through a local broker for $2.5 million, with the Goldman firm taking ownership late last fall.
The separate ownership of the building and the land it sits on have been a long-standing anomyly in the downtown real estate market. Clark said elimination of the multi-decade land lease sets the stage for a less complicated sale.
“It streamlines the deal by bringing the land and the building together,” Clark said. “It’s a building that needs an update, so it is probably more attractive for someone to come in an make needed physical investments.”
The deadline for submission of written bids is Feb. 20.
Built in 1958 by Manhattanbased Tishman Realty & Construction, the glass tower has a current vacancy rate that exceeds 95 percent. Its anchor tenant is National Fuel’s Customer Service Center, which remained on the building’s ground floor with the utility relocated its corporate offices.
The Class-B office building’s small floor plates, with less than 10,000-square-feet of usable space per floor, are considered a barrier for reuse by most large-scale tenants. The Goldman group is continuing to make upgrades to the building’s mechanical systems to make it more attractive to potential buyers.
Lillian Goldman Family LLC, once among New York City’s most powerful real estate groups with a portfolio of more than 800 properties, including the Chrysler Building, has had ties to the Buffalo property since the 1960s. The Goldman group’s local holdings also include a warehouse in the 1400- block of Niagara Street.
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