Lehman Brothers' New York headquarters near Times Square may be worth more than US$1 billion ($1.53 billion), making it among the company's most valuable assets.
The 32-storey skyscraper at 745 Seventh Ave has about 92,900 square metres of space and was bought by Lehman from Morgan Stanley in
2001 for about US$700 million.
The US$6994 a-square-metre price was a record for Manhattan at the time but now even around US$10,000 a sq m would be a conservative estimate, said Dan Fasulo, market research director for Real Capital Analytics.
Lehman owns or leases more than 204,400sq m of space in midtown Manhattan, or 1.5 per cent of Class A inventory, according to a report yesterday from BMO Capital Markets analyst Karine MacIndoe.
Should Lehman decide to sell the headquarters tower it would be bringing it to the market as Manhattan's office vacancy rate rose to the highest level since 2006.
Vacancies jumped to 7.1 per cent from 5.3 per cent a year earlier, New York-based Cushman & Wakefield, the largest closely held commercial real estate brokerage, said in a report.
The West 49th Street building is among the most striking in the area. The design includes a 60-metre-long, 12-metre-high computer-programmed electronic display.
Lehman's building would be the second state-of-the art trading facility to change hands since March, when JPMorgan agreed to buy Bear Stearns for US$10 billion and got Bear's US$1.1 billion, 45-storey headquarters in the bargain.
- BLOOMBERG
