Ohio teachers’ pension fund makes $432M investment in Hudson Yards

STRS Ohio buys 20% stake in 10 Hudson Yards

By Rick Bockmann | May 18, 2018 03:50PM

Michael Nehf, Jeff Blau and 10 Hudson Yards (Credit: LinkedIn and Related)

The Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group recapitalized a portion of their first Hudson Yards office tower with a $400 million-plus investment from the Ohio state teachers’ pension fund.

The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio paid $431.9 million to purchase a roughly 20 percent stake in the Coach-anchored 10 Hudson Yards, property records filed with the city Friday show.

A representative for STRS Ohio was not immediately available to comment, but a spokesperson for Related said the investment is “another vote of confidence” from an institutional investor in the Far West Side megaproject.

The pension plan joins German insurer Allianz and the Kuwait Investment Authority as an investor in the 52-story, 1.7 million-square-foot tower at the corner of 10th Avenue and West 30th Street.

Allianz paid $420 million in 2016 to buy the stake owned by Coach and a portion of the equity held by the Kuwait Investment Authority. The deal, which included a $1.2 billion refinancing of the property’s debt from Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, valued the tower at $2.15 billion.

The pension plan’s investment is the latest infusion of capital into the $25 billion, 17 million-square-foot Far West Side megaproject. The developers have tapped into myriad sources of capital to finance various stages of the project, as The Real Deal previously reported.

And this is not the first time Related and the pension plan have teamed up. The two jointly own the ground lease on the 240,000-square-foot retail condominium at the base of Related’s 240-unit rental building at One Union Square South.

STRS Ohio also owns the retail condo at 15 Union Square West and 1 million-square-foot office building at 590 Madison Avenue.

10 Hudson Yards, the first of two office towers Related and Oxford built over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Far West Side rail tracks, opened in 2016 and is fully leased to tenants including L’Oréal USA, SAP, the Boston Consulting Group, VaynerMedia, Intersection and Sidewalk Labs.

Related and Oxford are also teaming up with Mitsui Fudosan America to develop two other office towers at the complex.

The world’s biggest private RE investor has a new boss

Tom Arnold to take helm of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority

May 09, 2018 10:00AM

Tom Arnold and Waterline Square

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the world’s largest private investor in real estate, has named a new leader for its property division.

Tom Arnold will take over as global head of real estate from Bill Schwab at the company effective June 1, according to PERE News. The company is the largest private real estate institutional investor in the world with $47 billion in assets. Its New York investments include the luxury residential development Waterline Square , the London Hotel at 151 West 54th Street and the Edition Hotel at 5 Madison Avenue, which it purchased in 2015 for about $337 million.

Schwab held his position at ADIA for nine years. ADIA’s real estate team quadrupled in size under his tenure, and the company also increased the number of projects it manages internally. ADIA is currently estimated to have up to 50 million square feet of development either underway or planned.

Schwab came to ADIA from JPMorgan, and although he is expected to stay in real estate, his next role is unclear.

Arnold came to ADIA from private equity firm Cerberus Capital Partners and has also previously worked at Credit Suisse and ING Financial Services. His current role at ADIA is deputy global head of real estate. – Eddie Small