Real Estate

Time Warner commits to Hudson tower offices

Time Warner has sold its floors at Time Warner Center to Related Companies and its foreign partners — as expected.

The media company also announced Thursday it will move to Related’s Hudson Yards in 2018 — as expected.

So what’s new that wasn’t already anticipated?

Merely everything.

No deal’s done until it’s done. But few promised corporate relocations are as momentous as Time Warner’s commitment to Related’s and Oxford Property Group’s 30 Hudson Yards, an 80-story tower that will start to rise now that the media company has signed on to buy more than 1 million square feet of the project’s 2.6 million square feet.

Related and its joint-venture partners, a unit of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Singapore’s GIC, are paying Time Warner $1.3 billion for the 1.1 million square feet, which the media firm owned as a giant condominium unit in the twin-towered Columbus Circle skyscraper.

Terms have yet to be released for Time Warner’s purchase at Hudson Yards — all the parties would say Thursday was that the company had made “an initial financial commitment.”

But what matters most is that the agreement makes Hudson Yards — a 26-acre mixed-use project over rail yards between 10th and 12th avenues and West 30th and 33rd streets — real. It’s the largest private real estate development in US history.

The Time Warner breakthrough not only gets a second skyscraper designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox out of the ground, but also gives Related the confidence to start building a long-promised 10-acre platform over the train yard — as it says it will do in the next few weeks.