Two titans of New York City real estate sold a luxury retail space to a buyer who’s intimately familiar with the building’s sole tenant.
Marc Holliday’s SL Green and Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Properties sold 690 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side for $54.5 million, Crain’s reported. The sale of the 7,900-square-foot property breaks down to $6,900 per square foot.
Eastdil Secured’s Gary Phillips and Will Silverman brokered the sale of the five-story building, fully occupied by French luxury jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels. The identity of the buyer was not reported, and the deal is yet to appear in property records.
But PincusCo reported it was Van Cleef’s corporate parent, Richemont, that bought the space. If true, the deal would be another example of Sutton’s propensity to sell luxury retail spaces to companies that were already leasing them.
At the start of 2024, Wharton and SL Green sold the retail portion of 715-717 Fifth Avenue to Kering, the French luxury group behind the likes of Gucci and Balenciaga, for $963 million.
Sutton bought his 50 percent stake in 690 Madison Avenue in late 2024 for $34 million. Holliday’s real estate investment trust purchased the building through foreclosure for $74 million in 2021.
Prior to the stake sale, Van Cleef signed a lease for the full building, which sits at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 62nd Street. The site was previously home to a Hermes men’s store, which since relocated nearby to 706 Madison Avenue.
SL Green is in the midst of a plan to sell $2.5 billion worth of property. It has put its 1350 Sixth Avenue office tower up for sale, eyeing a price tag upwards of $360 million for the 600,000-square-foot building at West 55th Street, sources told The Real Deal.
The company started the initiative with a deal to sell a minority stake in the office building at 100 Park Avenue to Rockpoint at a $425 million valuation.
Other properties set to be put up for sale include a 25 percent stake in the 1.8 million-square-foot 245 Park Avenue and a 65 percent stake in 750 Third Avenue, an office building that SL Green is converting into apartments.
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