compare and contrast
own Wantagh OTB Branch but not the land it sits on
spend 23 million to buy Race Palace without slot machines, hookers, pole dancers etc
fail to operate restaurant in Carle Place Branch of Nassau OTB
fail to enter into useful and reasonable leases
and on and on and on. look at all the court cases
Dino Amoroso, Tom Suozzi's errand boy, and here comes Tom again looking for more?
Teresa Butler is licking her lips after being fired for not ringing the door bells for Tom Suozzi and suing and collecting in federal court in the Eastern District of New York.
Struggling Newspapers Sell Off Old Headquarters
By TERRY PRISTIN
They were once major symbols of civic pride and influence, often
situated in the heart of the city, and nearly equal in stature to nearby
city halls, courthouses and other major public buildings.
But increasingly, many of the buildings that served as newspaper
headquarters in cities around the country are being put on the market,
as a struggling industry searches desperately for ways to increase
revenue.
In recent months, The Washington Post put its downtown headquarters and
three warehouse buildings in Alexandria, Va., up for sale, and the
Tribune Company has hired a veteran real estate executive, who is
expected to help that company sell some of its holdings.
As a reflection of the print industry’s sorry state, the physical plant
in which the paper is produced is likely to have a far greater value
than the paper itself, especially when situated in a gentrifying
neighborhood.
This summer, for example, The New York Times Company agreed to sell The
Boston Globe to John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $70
million. CoStar, a real estate research company in Washington, estimated
that The Globe’s longtime headquarters on Morrissey Boulevard has a
value of $63.8 million.
The August sale of The Washington Post for $250 million to Jeff Bezos,
the founder of Amazon, included more than 700,000 square feet of
printing plants and warehouses and more than 60 acres of developable
land, according to CoStar. But it does not include the headquarters
building on 15th Street NW that the newspaper has occupied for more than
six decades.
Brokers said a buyer would probably tear down the building. “It’s a good
site, not a great site,” said William M. Collins, a Washington-based
principal of Cassidy Turley, a commercial brokerage.
Mr. Collins said the property would be far more desirable to a buyer if
it included a corner lot that is also owned by The Post. But Carr
Properties, a Washington company, has a long-term ground lease for the
140,400-square-foot building there, at 1100 15th Street. Neither JM Zell
Partners, a Washington real estate firm that is advising The Post, nor
Carr responded to telephone messages. Les J. Cranmer, a senior managing
director in Philadelphia for Studley, another of The Post’s brokers,
said the firm would have no comment.
Transactions that have already occurred involve papers both large and
small — from The Times Argus in Barre, Vt., (circ. 8,300) which sold its
headquarters to the city’s mayor, to The Seattle Times (circ. 237,000
on weekdays), whose landmark headquarters building is now owned by Omni,
a Vancouver development company. The company sold another building in
the same neighborhood to Simms Commercial Development of Beverly Hills
and became the building’s principal tenant.
In January, the owners of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News
said they would move the newspapers into more modern office space and
sell their building on Lafayette Boulevard, which was designed by Albert
Kahn and completed in 1917. And the old Free Press building, which
reporters moved out of in 1998, was just sold to a Chinese firm for more than $4 million at auction.
The San Jose Mercury News recently agreed to sell its 36-acre campus
along Interstate 880 for $30.5 million to Super Micro Computer, which
will eventually convert the site to manufacturing space.
In July, the Tribune Company, which emerged from years of bankruptcy
late last year, spun off its eight daily newspapers, including The Los
Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, into a separate company, but it
retained its seven million square feet of real estate assets, as well as
its broadcasting properties. The company named Murray McQueen, a former
managing director of real estate at Cerberus Capital Management, a
private equity fund in New York City, to figure out how to maximize the
value of its real estate portfolio.
In addition to assets like the 700,000-square-foot Los Angeles Times
building, the company has a trove of other properties, including a
shuttered printing plant on 20 valuable acres along the San Diego
Freeway, just south of South Coast Plaza, a prominent shopping center in
Orange County, said H. Carl Muhlstein, a managing director in Los
Angeles for the real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle.
The Los Angeles Times came close to moving to a downtown office building
two decades ago but got cold feet, Mr. Muhlstein said. “They just
couldn’t let go of the old environment and move into a traditional
office building,” he said.
Those days are long gone. Today, newspapers are seeking space that is
more efficient and suitable for modern technology and that will shrink
their footprint. Significant downsizing has left many papers with acres
of unused space aside from the cavernous areas that printing presses
used to occupy. After its 1924 gold-domed building was sold to a local
developer, Bart Blatstein, in 2011, The Philadelphia Inquirer and
Philadelphia Daily News leased 125,000 square feet, about one-fourth of
what it previously occupied, in the renovated former Strawbridge &
Clothier store on Eighth and Market Streets.
The sounds of slot machines may one day emanate from the former Miami
Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer buildings. The Herald’s choice location
along Biscayne Bay fetched an unusually high price — $236 million —
from Genting, a Malaysian company that hopes eventually to persuade
local officials to allow it to build a casino as part of a luxury resort
and condominium development.
Mr. Blatstein paid a mere $22 million for the Philadelphia headquarters
building, which is a little north of Center City. Now he hopes to obtain
a gambling license from the state. “I didn’t buy the building with the
intention of doing that,” he said, “but it lays out perfectly for a
casino.”
As their staffs began to shrink, some companies leased space to other
tenants rather than pick up stakes. Last year, a call center company,
VXI Global Solutions, took two floors in the Los Angeles Times building.
Yahoo has leased three floors in the San Francisco Chronicle building.
And then there are newspapers like The Poughkeepsie Journal in New York
that have become tenants in buildings they once owned.
In 2009, The New York Times raised $225 million to pay off debt by
selling 750,000 square feet of its new headquarters building to W. P.
Carey, a New York company that specializes in so-called sale-leasebacks.
The Times has said it plans to exercise its option to buy the space
back in 2019 for $250 million, well below the probable market value.
Jason Fox, a managing director at W. P. Carey who worked on the deal,
said that it was not unusual for companies with buyback options to
arrange another sale-leaseback.
The Times’s broker, Mary Ann Tighe, the regional chief executive of CBRE, would not discuss the newspaper’s plans.
Moving out of a marquee building into generic space may help the bottom
line, but it also makes a statement, said Rick Edmonds, the media
business analyst at the Poynter Institute, which specializes in
journalism education. “It’s a serious issue when you’re dealing with
advertisers,” he said. “Advertisers like to be with winners.”
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