Brokers at 245/261 Fifth Ave.

Eastern Consolidated Properties, Inc. announced the sale of the last of the remaining properties in the IPA-portion of the world-renowned Irving Schneider/Helmsley New York real estate portfolio. The transaction included the sale of the two office properties at 245 and 261 Fifth Avenue with a combined rentable space of 680,000 square feet. They were acquired for $135 million by a fund controlled by Koll Bren Schreiber Realty Advisors from IPA, a publicly held real estate company. The two properties at 245 and 261 Fifth Avenue constitute the remaining assets of what had been known as the "IPA Portfolio," which once consisted of over 4 million square feet of office properties in New York and Chicago.

The sale to Koll Bren Schreiber was brokered by Eastern Consolidated Properties, Inc. for the purchaser and by Helmsley Spear for the seller. Philip D. Restifo, executive director of Eastern's Mortgage Finance unit, with Peter Hauspurg, chairman of Eastern, represented Koll Bren Schreiber.

The IPA portfolio, much of which has been liquidated in the past several years, originally included five signature New York metropolitan landmarks including 1440 Broadway, recently purchased by Max Capital for $152 million and a 50 percent share in 1328 Broadway, also known as the Marbridge Building, recently purchased by RFR Holdings, LLC. In addition to the two Fifth Avenue locations, the IPA New York portfolio also included the Mojud Building in Long Island City, sold recently for 6.5 million. The remaining IPA sites include the newest IPA-acquired building, 570 Broad Street, a 190,000 square-foot, 14-story office building in Newark, New Jersey and two plots of undeveloped land in Houston, Texas.

Sold as individual investments, the properties have created substantially more revenue for IPA shareholders. Regarding the most recent Fifth Avenue transactions, Glen Siegel, president of Belvedere Capital, commented, "As co-general partners, we supported Irving Schneider throughout the entire sales process. We were delighted with the results of the transaction involving these two prime Fifth Avenue properties as well as all of the liquidation results." Siegel added, "This particular transaction was very smooth and all of the parties involved worked hard to conclude the transaction."

While outside the traditional Midtown office corridor, 245 and 261 Fifth Avenue are being transformed from so-called "industry buildings," which once catered almost exclusively to the office and showroom needs of the housewares and carpet industries, to more diverse, multi-tenanted office properties that are being positioned to attract conventional office tenants. "These two properties are poised to capture their share of the continued migration of commercial office tenants to Midtown South and represent excellent value significantly below replacement cost," said Philip D. Restifo following the transaction. "They are located in a neighborhood on lower Fifth Avenue that is transitioning from a secondary market for office users to a more traditional one, with restaurants, retail and residential development thriving as well as an increasingly diversified tenant base," he added.