Arad Holdings buys 70 Broad Street for $9.35 million, 89% below 2016 ask

The American Bank Note Company Building at 70 Broad Street in Manhattan's Financial District has sold to Arad Holdings for $9.35 million, roughly $480 a square foot across the landmarked property's 19,478 square feet and about a tenth of its peak asking price, Commercial Observer first reported. The prices attached to the building over the past decade trace a steady retreat: an $88 million ask in 2016, cut to approximately $43 million by 2018; a $15 million loan originated by Silverpeak Real Estate Finance in 2015 and later securitized; foreclosure proceedings that began in 2020; Winta's Chapter 11 filing in 2024; and a $20 million credit bid by Wilmington Trust, as trustee for the CMBS trust, in 2025.

The last row is the one lenders will read: Wilmington Trust took the collateral at $20 million roughly a year before a resale that came in below $10 million, a mark the auction itself did not produce. That $20 million credit bid exceeded the $15 million Silverpeak loan, a gap that suggests it accounted for more than principal alone, and it did not hold as a floor; the 2016 asking price was no better a ceiling. Both figures were set by the circumstances of their sellers rather than by a deep field of competing buyers.

Because the 2015 loan was pooled, the endgame ran through a trustee holding collateral for bondholders rather than a bank working a borrower directly, and the visible sequence — default in 2020, bankruptcy in 2024, a credit bid in 2025, a resale in 2026 — is what that structure produces when it runs to the end. By the time Arad closed, the asset had sat in lenders' and courts' hands for the better part of six years.

The building's earlier life involved owners with uses of their own. It sold to the Bank of Tokyo in 1988, passed later to the fast-food franchisers Murray and Irwin Reise for $3.5 million, and in 1995 went to Tony Goldman, later the creator of Wynwood in Miami, who paid $1.3 million and used it for a restaurant and his offices. Kirby, Petit & Green designed the Neoclassical property in the early 1900s as the American Bank Note Company's administrative and sales offices; the company produced currency, stock certificates and other material requiring engraved printing, and the facade keeps two long columns and a carved eagle over the doorway.

Arad plans to reposition the building, though the coverage of the sale does not say how; the layout sets the boundaries, with commercial space on the first, second and lower levels and a private elevator to three full-floor residential units across the third through fifth floors. The property sits between Beaver and Marketfield streets, was largely vacant for years, and carries landmark designation. Arad is not new to lower Manhattan — it is part of the joint venture that purchased the 298-room former Ritz-Carlton/Wagner hotel in Battery Park City — and it bought through Louis Franco and Joseph Isa of Isa Realty Group, with the attorney Eric S. Schoenfeld of Tannenbaum Helpern. Wilmington Trust's side of the trade ran through a Cushman & Wakefield team of Dylan Walsh, Bryan Hurley, Jeremy Stern and Kieran Baker.

A footprint of 19,478 square feet spread over five floors, three of them residential and the whole of it behind a landmarked facade, is not the kind of asset that draws a wide institutional field. That narrower buyer universe is a plausible reason for the gap between what the trust bid and what it accepted, though the coverage does not describe how many offers Arad beat. The sale also establishes a reference price for small vintage Financial District buildings whose lenders would otherwise keep carrying them, roughly half what the Winta-affiliated group paid in 2010, before it renovated.

The configuration is unusual enough to shape any plan: three full-floor apartments served by a private elevator sit above commercial space that stood empty, leaving a buyer a few routes — keep the lower floors for a single user and let the apartments stand, convert the whole building to residential, or split the two programmatically. The basis Arad paid allows for any of them.

Manhattan's office demand has returned unevenly, concentrated in trophy buildings rather than the wider inventory, a pattern this publication has followed through law firm leasing. A five-story building of this size, more than a century old and empty, sits outside that recovery rather than at its edge, and nothing in the sale suggests an occupier's rent roll set the price.

A buyer at this basis can underwrite a residential conversion, a boutique commercial repositioning or some combination of the two without needing the property to approach the roughly $4,500 a square foot implied by the 2016 asking price. The three floor-through apartments above the commercial levels are where that plan will surface first, and nothing reported so far describes what Arad intends to do with them.