A Tuesday foreclosure auction brought a paltry sale for Fifth Avenue property tied to Robert Siegel’s Metropole Realty Advisors. It may not be the saga’s final chapter, though.
Metropole’s 681 Fifth Avenue sold at auction for a measly $100,000, Crain’s reported. Siegel attended the auction at the New York County Courthouse, but reserved comment after seeing the property sold to lender Wells Fargo in a literal New York minute.
The office property is the first Siegel has lost to foreclosure in his career, but the loss has been years in the making.
Metropole acquired the property in 2005 for $86 million from Fortunoff, a New York-based furniture and jewelry retailer. The building is located between East 53rd and East 54th streets, one of the world’s priciest stretches of retail real estate.
Metropole’s $215 million CMBS loan came from a 2016 refinancing of the office and retail building by UBS and Citigroup. The loan, set to mature this November, replaced a $125 million Ladder Capital loan that was scheduled to mature in 2018.
Fortunes fell in 2023, when Metropole became delinquent on the $215 million loan tied to the property, according to Trepp. Four years earlier, the building lost the Tommy Hilfiger flagship, the largest tenant at the Fifth Ave property, occupying 27 percent of the 82,00 square feet. The fashion designer also represented 77 percent of the total annualized base rent when the mortgage was securitized.
In 2024, special servicer Rialto Capital sued Metropole on behalf of the lenders for failing to make its CMBS loan payments on the 12-story building over the preceding months. At the time, Metropole allegedly missed monthly payments of about $773,000, totaling roughly $2.4 million.
The lawsuit set the foreclosure proceedings in motion. Today, the building has more than $260 million in total defaulted debt attached to it.
But its prospects could be dimmed by Siegel himself, who reportedly owns land and easements for properties directly south of 681 Fifth Avenue. That could give him the opportunity to develop a project that directly interferes with 681 Fifth Avenue.
Another possibility, a person familiar told Crain’s, could be Siegel trying to reacquire the building before launching an office-to-residential conversion.
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