JPMorgan Buys $243.5M Midtown NYC Rental Tower

JPMorgan just bought a Midtown rental building for nearly $250 million.

Barings, fund manager for the insurance company MassMutual, sold the Riverbank building at 560 West 43rd Street for $243.5 million, according to property records. Commercial Observer first reported the news.

The deal comes in at $627 per square foot for the 388,073-square-foot building, which rises 44 stories and spans a whole block.

The sale was negotiated by a team from JLL Capital Markets. That group included senior managing directors Jeffrey Julien, Rob Hinckley and Andrew Scandalios, alongside managing director Steven Rutman and vice president Devon Warren.

The Midtown building has a total of 418 units. Current listings on StreetEast show that a studio goes for $3,835 per month and a three-bedroom unit for $8,240 per month. The building also has nearly 18,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

The building was last sold in 1991, when developer Harry Macklowe handed it over to MassMutual, which held its debt, after the real estate crash forced him to relinquish ownership.

In March, JPMorgan secured $176 million in financing from Brookfield to purchase an Atlanta portfolio of single-family rentals. In February, the company projected growth in the New York multifamily market, citing factors like rising rents and low vacancy rates. With this deal, the financial firm is now securing its own stake in that outlook.

Barings, meanwhile, has been beefing up its real estate footprint in recent months, announcing in February that it planned to acquire Artemis Real Estate Partners. In June, it bought an office campus in Los Angeles for almost $151 million.

To support JPMorgan’s acquisition of the property, JLL’s Kelly Gaines, Geoff Goldstein, and Michael Shmuely arranged a $128.3 million loan from Freddie Mac. The loan will be managed by JLL Real Estate Capital.

— Quinn Waller