Tishman Speyer Selling 148 Lafayette Street To Shorenstein
Tishman Speyer is selling a Soho office building that it bought about a year ago for a 30 percent markup — the latest sign of New York’s surging office market.
The Rob Speyer-led company is in contract to sell 148 Lafayette Street to Shorenstein Properties for approximately $135 million, The Real Deal has learned. That’s a healthy bump from the $105.5 million Tishman paid when it bought the building about 16 months ago.
In the short amount of time it’s owned the building, Tishman expanded its largest tenant (venture capital firm General Catalyst) and quickly re-leased two available floors to the AI firm Graphite. In the meantime, Manhattan’s office leasing market is on track to record its best year since 2000, according to Colliers.
Representatives for Tishman Speyer and Shorenstein declined to comment.
A Newmark team led by Adam Spies and Avery Silverstein negotiated the deal.
Standing at the corner of Howard and Lafayette streets, the 12-story, 155,000-square-foot building is 100 percent leased, according to marketing materials. The contract price works out to about $870 per square foot.
In addition to General Catalyst and Graphite, tenants include WeWork, the cosmetics company Charlotte Tilbury, digital picture frame seller Aura Frames and the consulting firm Keystone Strategy.
The General Catalyst deal was done at $120 per square foot, according to Newmark’s offering memo. That’s compared to the average in-place rents of $97 per square foot — highlighting an opportunity to hike rents as leases expire.
Tishman bought the property in May of last year, the company’s first New York office investment since 2019, when it acquired the long-term lease on the Morgan North U.S. Post Office building near Hudson Yards. It was a time when other office investors such as Blackstone and SL Green, who had sat on the sidelines in recent years, were getting back into buy mode.
The seller, Steven and Michael Elghanayan’s EPIC, had paid $126.5 million for the property in 2012.
This appears to be Shorenstein’s first New York purchase in some time.
The third-generation family firm based in San Francisco has been dealing with distress throughout its portfolio, and in 2025 made some major staffing cuts. But the company has recently returned to dealmaking.
In July the company bought a Bay Area office building for $78 million, and in the past few months it picked up a pair of Texas office buildings, of which the sale price was not disclosed but had been valued for tax purposes at close to $200 million.
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