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<\/p>\nGary Barnett\u00a0just scored a victory\u00a0in\u00a0his tussle with two other New York real estate heavyweights over control of a prominent Midtown\u00a0office tower.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Worldwide Plaza is the subject of a foreclosure dispute between Extell Development and a joint venture of SL Green and RXR.\n <\/p>\n
A New York County Supreme Court judge this week denied an attempt by SL Green and RXR to block Extell Development<\/a>‘s\u00a0scheduled\u00a0foreclosure auction of\u00a0Worldwide Plaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n The decision clears the way for Extell to pursue a UCC foreclosure for the ownership of the nearly 2M SF building at 825 Eighth Ave., rescheduling an initial auction from earlier this month to Thursday, new court filings show<\/a>.<\/p>\n Judge Andrea Masley denied a request by SL Green and RXR<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which control the building through a jointly\u00a0owned majority stake \u2014\u00a0for a preliminary injunction, saying the plaintiffs had not satisfied a key requirement proving the building\u2019s sale would be commercially unreasonable.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re disappointed in the most recent ruling,\u201d an SL Green<\/a>\u00a0spokesperson told Bisnow. \u201cHowever, we still own and control the asset and we believe we will ultimately reach a resolution with the mezz lender which meets all parties\u2019 objectives.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n RXR declined to comment. A spokesperson for Extell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n A shell company acquired $190M in\u00a0mezzanine debt<\/a>\u00a0tied to the 49-story office tower, originated in 2017 by\u00a0Goldman Sachs<\/a> and Deutsche Bank<\/a>,\u00a0and sued to foreclose in November, Bisnow first reported<\/a>. It was later revealed that Barnett owned the\u00a0company and used it to acquire the debt from Shinhan Financial Group, which had bought\u00a0it\u00a0from Goldman and Deutsche,\u00a0The Real Deal reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n RXR and SL Green\u00a0filed suit\u00a0this month to try to block Extell from proceeding with the foreclosure attempt, calling the process a \u201csham auction,\u201d The Real Deal reported at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n The\u00a0two NYC stalwarts\u00a0claimed in a Jan. 7 court filing<\/a> that Extell is trying to control Worldwide Plaza\u2019s debt restructuring process through the foreclosure rather than genuinely attempting to recover its mezzanine debt. The joint venture claimed the way Extell structured the auction was designed to prevent other bidders.<\/p>\n It’s now unclear if the auction will go ahead or if SL Green and RXR can negotiate a solution with Barnett. Either way, the building is desperately in need of a turnaround.<\/p>\n The SL Green and RXR partnership acquired\u00a0its stake in Worldwide Plaza in 2017 in a transaction valuing the building at $1.7B. But the ownership \u2014 which includes New York REIT Liquidating \u2014 defaulted on the building’s\u00a0$1.2B in mortgages\u00a0in 2024.<\/p>\n That was after\u00a0Worldwide Plaza’s anchor tenant, Cravath, Swaine & Moore,\u00a0relocated to<\/a> Two Manhattan West, leaving a 617K SF vacancy that has yet to be filled. In August, appraisers slashed Worldwide Plaza\u2019s value<\/a>\u00a0by 80% to just $345M.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nomura Holdings, the U.S. arm of the Japanese bank, is the building\u2019s largest remaining tenant.\u00a0It reached a deal in June to terminate roughly 75K SF of its footprint by January 2027. It still has 630K SF on a lease that expires in 2033.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gary Barnett\u00a0just scored a victory\u00a0in\u00a0his tussle with two other New York real estate heavyweights over control of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[4317,9840,75,84,83,9,24,63,10318,4191,23353],"class_list":{"0":"post-117856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-cmbs","9":"tag-extell","10":"tag-manhattan","11":"tag-manhattan-headlines","12":"tag-manhattan-news","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-rxr","17":"tag-sl-green","18":"tag-worldwide-plaza"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}