DRA Advisors takes 49% of 1301 Avenue of the Americas in Rithm joint venture

Rithm Capital has a capital partner for the Midtown tower it acquired as part of its Paramount Group purchase, and the arrangement arrives with the first hard numbers attached to the asset: DRA Advisors is taking a 49 percent stake in 1301 Avenue of the Americas, the 45-story, 1.7 million-square-foot building at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 53rd Street, in a joint venture that sources close to the transaction put the building's value at $1.3 billion, as Commercial Observer first reported.

The other 51 percent stays with Rithm, which keeps the operator's seat and runs the building through Elecor Properties, the subsidiary formerly known as Paramount Group, an owner selling down a slice of its basis while holding on to the platform that runs the asset, signs the leases and keeps the tenants.

What the stake cost is where the arithmetic bites. A 49 percent interest struck against a $1.3 billion valuation implies a position worth roughly $637 million before whatever debt sits on the property, a layer of the capital structure the reporting does not describe. Measured across the tower's 1.7 million square feet, the valuation works out to about $765 a foot — a number that lets a fully leased Midtown building be stacked against the next fully leased Midtown building.

Last year Rithm, an alternatives manager and a publicly traded mortgage REIT, bought Paramount Group's entire office portfolio for $1.7 billion and rebranded the platform as Elecor Properties in April 2026. Elecor's holdings now include 745 Fifth Avenue, 900 Third Avenue and 31 West 52nd Street in Manhattan, plus One Market Plaza and 300 Mission Street in San Francisco, which makes 1301 Avenue of the Americas one line inside a portfolio-level wager; bringing a partner into a single building is the follow-through on that purchase.

“Partnering with an experienced, well-capitalized firm like DRA allows us to continue growing Rithm's asset management platform while staying closely involved in the asset's long-term success,” said Michael Nierenberg, Rithm's chief executive, in a statement. For a mortgage REIT that has been assembling management capacity around buildings it already owns, the statement's two halves are the point — the fee stream grows and the operating mandate stays put.

The building is fully leased, and its tenants include KeyBank, Piper Sandler, Crédit Agricole and O'Melveny & Myers, a roster weighted toward banks and law firms — the credit that makes a rent roll underwritable and separates this asset from the office loans still trading below face. The tower opened in 1964 and has carried two names across its life, the Crédit Lyonnais Building and the J.C. Penney Building.

Newmark's Adam Doneger, Adam Spies and Ben Lushing arranged the transaction, according to the report, and Doneger framed the buyer's conviction in a statement: “DRA's investment alongside Rithm reflects strong conviction in both 1301 Avenue of the Americas and the broader New York City office market.” Brett Gottlieb, a senior managing director at DRA Advisors, called the tower “a premier asset in one of the country's strongest office markets” and said the firm looked forward to “combining our respective strengths at 1301 and growing the partnership from here.” Both statements describe the posture the deal was built to attract — a well-capitalized partner content to hold a minority position behind an operator.

For the office market's clearing-price question, the structure carries more information than the headline valuation. Manhattan investment sales reporting found first-half 2026 volume of $10.173 billion, a pace running ahead of 2025, with BKREA's argument that the count of properties sold — not the dollar total — is what distinguishes a busier market from a pricier one. A partnership recapitalization sits awkwardly in either column, because capital changes hands while the asset does not. Rithm's raising a partner against a fully leased tower it intends to keep operating points to an owner that wants liquidity from the building without conceding the building — a different bet from the discounted-loan trades that have set office's clearing levels.

PWD reported on Oct. 2 that Rithm had closed the joint venture at 1301 Avenue of the Americas with terms undisclosed. The reporting since supplies the two missing pieces — the size of the stake and the mark it was struck against — putting the pricing on the record within days of the closing rather than at the end of a marketing process.

Whether DRA's capital stays at 1301 Avenue of the Americas or travels across Elecor's portfolio is now the open question. Gottlieb's line about “growing the partnership from here” leaves the second road open, and Rithm's platform holds four more Manhattan addresses and two in San Francisco behind the building it just shared. Whether the next Elecor tower gets a partner, or a buyer, is a question this closing does not answer.