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New York’s billion-dollar office building club is getting a new member.
The Times Square Tower — at the “Crossroads of the World” — is hitting the market with a target price of $1.6 billion.
Boston Properties developed the 1.2 million square-foot building on a full block bounded by 41st and 42nd streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue. It also developed 5 Times Square across the street.
Sources said Douglas Harmon and Adam Spies of Eastdil Secured have been hired to market the 47-story building designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The glass tower’s largest office tenants include Ann Taylor, which has over 320,000 square feet, and law firms Pryor Cashman and O’Melveny & Myers, with 100,000 and 200,000 square feet, respectively. Newer tenants are paying $80-plus per square foot.
Ann Taylor also has a store in the base, as does perennial tourist favorite Ruby Tuesday. With area retail rents pushing $1,500 a square foot, future retail turnover will be a driver of the pricing.
While the investment market for trophy properties dragged in the first quarter, a string of $1 billion-plus sales have either been completed in recent weeks or are in the works.
Sources say more trophies will hit the market to take advantage of the global interest in New York real estate, higher pricing and stable interest rates with readily available mortgages.
Boston Properties, led by Daily News Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, spent roughly $650 million developing Times Square Tower 10 years ago.
With the now-stabilized asset nearly 100 percent leased, a sale at this time would more than double its money and provide the firm with fresh capital to redeploy on other projects.
Earlier this year, Boston Properties President Doug Linde said the firm would be selling $1 billion in assets.
Linde revealed Times Square Tower was on the market at the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trust meeting yesterday in Chicago, Bloomberg News reported.