Corebridge writes $293 million on a fully leased Meatpacking building

Walker & Dunlop said Friday that it arranged $293.2 million of fixed-rate permanent debt on 40 Tenth Ave., the 158,957-square-foot mixed-use property in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. Corebridge Financial funded the refinancing for Aurora Capital and William Gottlieb Real Estate. The placement ran eight Walker & Dunlop Capital Markets Institutional Advisory professionals—Dustin Stolly, Aaron Appel, Jonathan Schwartz, Keith Kurland, Adam Schwartz, Sean Reimer, Jordan Casella and Stanley Cayre.

The collateral explains the appetite: 112,241 square feet of office across floors three through 10, 46,716 square feet of retail across the ground and second floors, and Hyundai Motor occupying the entire retail component. The office tenants are Starwood Capital Group, WestCap Management, RTW Investments, Stripes and Checkout.com, all in a Studio Gang-designed building that completed in 2019 and is fully leased—putting Corebridge in at roughly $1,845 a foot.

Just under 30% of the building sits with a single corporate credit at street level, and that credit is what underwrites the office floors above. Stolly's pitch is that 'building quality, location and experience' separate the property for tenants, and an insurance company committing permanent paper is the market agreeing with him. The structure reads sharpest against the $390 million Park Tower financing this publication covered in September: two floating-rate, interest-only tranches carrying a Journal Square lease-up through 2029, one resting on a rent roll that exists and the other on absorption that has yet to arrive.

Office's clearing price is being set one trade at a time, with the next marks coming from owner-user notes and leasing spreads rather than appraisals. A refinancing prints nothing of the kind—it fixes duration and settles who holds the asset, which leaves $1,845 a foot a lender's number rather than a market's. The filter it reveals is this: life capital will term out 2019-vintage Manhattan product with a single credit at the base on conventional fixed-rate terms, and that is the top of the maturity wall finding its bid.

Walker & Dunlop's August placement, the $74.5 million acquisition-and-redevelopment loan for a Stamford office-to-condo conversion, shows the other end of the same shop's book, pricing an obsolete tower off a residential completion value. The two deals, run from the same originator with two different underwriting stories, mark the spread where the office market's repricing actually lives. Whether a life company repeats this term sheet on a building that still has vacancy to fix is the mark worth watching.