Foreclosure Forced The Only Office Comp That Printed

Sagehall paid $47 million for 428 Broadway, a six-story SoHo office building at Howard Street. The sellers — Roget Lerner, Jean-Marc Donics and Michael Chetrit — had taken title through a $40 million foreclosure, then resold. The deal closed August 19 and was recorded September 3.

The building holds 42,000 square feet of built area plus roughly 29,475 square feet of unused air rights, for about 71,505 square feet buildable. It went roughly 96% vacant after WeWork's 2023 bankruptcy emptied four floors. The Chetrit Group's original 2005 basis was $22.5 million.

Strip out the distress narrative and look at what cleared. A 96%-vacant SoHo office building drew $1,119.05 per built square foot. That is not a distressed number in absolute terms. Across total buildable area the price drops to $657.30 per square foot — a rational basis for a SoHo repositioning or ground-up play. The air rights are the asset.

Against the 2005 basis of $535.71 per square foot, the property has run 2.09x, up 108.9%, a 3.42% compound annual rate over 21 years. The resale cleared the $40 million foreclosure credit bid by $7 million, up 17.5%.

The mechanism matters more than the math. Foreclosure stripped the mortgage and delivered clean title, then a fast resale converted a workout into a marketable asset. That process forces every figure into the public record. Nobody at 428 Broadway chose to disclose.

Implication: the office prices that print are increasingly the ones nobody could suppress. Anyone building an office comp set off public records this quarter is sampling the distressed tail and calling it the market.

Flag: the 29,475 sf air-rights figure derives from listing data, not a recorded instrument. Vacancy is reported as of the WeWork exit, not at closing.