A prestigious Fifth Avenue skyscraper is up for sale and could fetch US$3 billion or more, which would be a record price for a US office building.
The General Motors building, a 50-story tower built in 1968 at the southeast corner of Central Park across from the Plaza Hotel, occupies a full city block and is best known as the home of two retail tourist attractions, the FAO Schwarz toy emporium and Apple's glass cube store.
General Motors Corp sold the building in 1991 and the automaker now occupies only a few floors.
NEW RECORD
Real estate industry experts said its sale price would easily exceed the previous record of US$1.8 billion, which was set in 2006 by a 41-story building six blocks further south on Fifth Avenue.
One of the potential buyers for the tower is real-estate investor Joseph Cayre, who told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that he, along with unidentified partners in the Middle East, had put in a bid of at least US$3 billion.
A source familiar with the bidding process said real estate investor Larry Silverstein, the developer of the World Trade Center, had also offered at least US$3 billion.
The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were ongoing.
A spokesman for the tower's owner, Harry Macklowe, declined to comment on Wednesday.
Macklowe bought the building from the insurance firm Conseco for US$1.4 billion in 2003.
PROBLEMS
His organization began soliciting offers after running into a multibillion dollar credit problem associated with the recent purchase of several other expensive Manhattan buildings.
The offers for the GM building demonstrate continued optimism about Manhattan's real estate market, which continues to sizzle.
"You need to separate New York City from the national trend," said Andy Simon, senior managing director of the New York office of the real estate services firm NAI Global.
FUNDAMENTALS
With vacancy rates low, rents going up and relatively little new office space under construction in the metropolis, "the underlying fundamentals in New York for commercial real estate remain very strong," Simon said.
The weak US dollar would also allow foreign investors to buy the skyscraper at something of a discount, Simon said.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
COORDINATION, ASSURANCE: Separately, representatives reintroduced a bill that asks the state department to review guidelines on how the US engages with Taiwan US senators on Tuesday introduced the Taiwan travel and tourism coordination act, which they said would bolster bilateral travel and cooperation. The bill, proposed by US senators Marsha Blackburn and Brian Schatz, seeks to establish “robust security screenings for those traveling to the US from Asia, open new markets for American industry, and strengthen the economic partnership between the US and Taiwan,” they said in a statement. “Travel and tourism play a crucial role in a nation’s economic security,” but Taiwan faces “pressure and coercion from the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]” in this sector, the statement said. As Taiwan is a “vital trading
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