Tishman's SoHo flip was a leasing trade

Tishman Speyer is selling the 12-story office building at 148 Lafayette Street to Shorenstein Properties for around $135 million, roughly $871 a square foot. Tishman bought the property sixteen months ago for $105.5 million and has spent the time since filling it with tenants.

The Real Deal first reported the sale; Newmark's Adam Spies, Doug Harmon, Adam Doneger, Marcella Fasulo, Avery Silverstein and Joshua King handled it, and Shorenstein outbid several institutional buyers, including private equity funds, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

Tishman bought 148 Lafayette from Epic in May 2025 for $105.5 million, $68.3 million of it covered by an acquisition loan from Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies. That price was a markdown from the $126.5 million Epic had paid in 2012 — down about 17 percent across thirteen years, an unflattering round trip for a long holder that says more about SoHo office pricing than about the building. At $135 million, Shorenstein is paying roughly 28 percent above Tishman's 2025 basis and about 7 percent above the 2012 number.

The gross spread — about $29.5 million, against the roughly $37 million of equity the Blackstone loan left Tishman holding — came from the leasing that Tishman did during the hold, not from a rising market. When Tishman bought the building it was not full; since January 2025, about 70 percent of the office portion has been leased to new tenants at rents running $70 to $120 a square foot. Buy a partly leased asset at a discount, spend the capital and the months to sign the leases, then sell the finished rent roll. That is the trade, and the margin belongs to the leasing team that executed it.

Tishman's own framing has aged into a preview. Albert Schmool, a managing director at the firm, described 148 Lafayette at the time of the 2025 purchase as a chance to capitalize on a strengthening New York City office leasing environment in one of the city's most dynamic neighborhoods. Sixteen months on, the leasing environment did strengthen, Tishman's team did the leasing, and the gain is Tishman's.

In August Tishman put the fee simple interest in 6 Grand Central, the former 666 Third Avenue, on the market at around $450 million, and in June its debt platform bought the $40 million mezzanine loan on One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, right after 601W Companies bought the 50-story tower. Before the 2025 acquisition, Tishman had not bought a Manhattan building since 2019, or any U.S. building since 2021. What the return to buying has produced, so far, is one SoHo purchase placed on the market sixteen months later.

Shorenstein's side of the ledger is quieter than the headline: it is buying 141,359 square feet of office and 13,454 square feet of retail, both fully leased, to a roster that includes the investment firm General Catalyst, the AI code review company Graphite, WeWork, Charlotte Tilbury, Aura Frames, Keystone, Five Points Academy and 260 Sample Sale. All but 12,315 square feet of the space is committed into the 2030s, and the newer leases Tishman signed during the hold are the $70-to-$120 paper.

The building itself is a 1913 structure — LEED Gold, renovated in 2007 and 2017, per Tishman Speyer. Its retail base runs across the ground and lower floors and is leased to a martial arts gym and a discount luxury retailer, so Shorenstein is buying both halves of a rent roll that is fully leased.

That rent roll is the whole underwriting case, and it cuts both ways. It is durable cash at a moment when vacancy is the market's central fear, and it is largely fixed. Shorenstein has paid a full price for a building whose near-term mark-to-market amounts to one 12,315-square-foot slice; if SoHo rents keep climbing through the decade, the tenants who signed in 2025 and 2026 pocket the difference and Shorenstein collects the coupon it already owns. Repricing a recovery thesis requires space that can reprice, and almost none of this one will before the 2030s.

Against the wider office tape, a mid-sized, fully leased building changing hands at a price both sides can defend is exactly the kind of trade the market needs, rather than a trophy or a distressed sale. Each such comp does work an index cannot. When Kawa Capital Management bought Norfolk's 150 West Main at $111 a foot, the fresh mark it gave every lender in that market was the point. In Manhattan, Thor Equities' deal for ESRT's 1359 Broadway told sellers where a 95 percent-leased tower clears. A $871-a-foot print in SoHo is that mark for a different neighborhood and a smaller asset, and the direction is what matters: above the 2025 basis, above the 2012 basis, on a building that is 100 percent leased.

Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies wrote the acquisition loan at roughly 65 percent of Tishman's purchase price, and that loan is being repaid sixteen months later at a markup. There is a broader pattern: office debt has been re-entering the market behind equity, after the trade prices. Here the order ran in reverse: the loan landed before the leasing was done, which is a different risk from lending against a stabilized rent roll. That a debt fund would underwrite a lease-up at that kind of leverage suggests office credit is reopening on business plans, not only on buildings.

Other SoHo landlords should watch one figure from this trade: the 12,315 square feet of 148 Lafayette that is not committed into the 2030s. Everything else in the building is a contract, and that slice is the only part still exposed to what SoHo rents do next.