CBS Building Sells for $760M

51 West 52nd St.

Harbor Group International has entered into a definitive agreement with ViacomCBS for the purchase of 51 West 52nd St.—also known as the CBS Building—in Midtown Manhattan’s Plaza District. The price reached $760 million, marking the Class A building’s first sale. The deal is slated to close before the end of the year, with ViacomCBS leasing back its space on a short-term basis. CBRE’s Darcy Stacom and Bill Shanahan represented the seller.

The new owner intends to implement a comprehensive capital improvement plan to upgrade the 38-story high-rise. A designated New York City Landmark, the building also known as Black Rock—due to its dark granite facade—was built to serve as CBS’s headquarters. Viacom and CBS Corp.’s merger was completed in late 2019.

The 817,095-square-foot building opened in the 1960s and is the only skyscraper designed by Eero Saarinen. The tower offers 24,252-square-foot floorplates and is LEED Silver certified, according to CommercialEdge.

Betting on NYC

With the purchase, Harbor will expand its Manhattan office portfolio, which already comprised two other Midtown assets: 24 West 40th St. and 55 Broadway. In January 2020, Harbor closed on the $372 million purchase of Newport Office Center IV, an 861,000-square-foot tower in Jersey City, N.J. LeFrak Organization was the seller of the Class A property. That building is part of the 600-acre master-planned Newport neighborhood, developed by LeFrak along the Hudson River waterfront.

Even though Manhattan remained the gateway market with the lowest office vacancy rate as of July, deal volume lowered significantly since the pandemic started. In the first half of 2021, the market’s total transaction volume reached $2.1 billion, representing a 38.6 percent drop compared to the same period last year, according to CommercialEdge data. The Plaza District’s 11.8 percent vacancy rate as of July is one of the highest in the borough, but still below Soho’s 15.5 percent.