Special Servicer Picks Up $900M CMBS Loan For 20 Times Square
A CMBS loan worth $900M for Maefield Development’s 20 Times Square has been transferred to a special servicer.
The loan was sent to special servicing on Nov. 3 after a default due to a $26.8M lien filed against the property, Commercial Observer reported.
The loan’s outstanding balance for the 42-story property, also known as 701 Seventh Ave., is spread across four deals. The liens were reportedly filed in connection to various foreclosures and construction of a hotel at the mixed-use property.
20 Times Square was briefly a 452-key Marriott International hotel that opened in August 2019, and its closure a year later was attributed to the pandemic.
French bank Natixis originally supplied the loan to Maefield in 2018 with a May 2023 maturity date, according to The Real Deal. The property’s 99-year ground lease served as collateral, along with revenue from the hotel, the property’s four floors of retail space and electronic billboards in Times Square, Commercial Observer reported.
The property’s planned retail anchor was the National Football League, which had a 43K SF experiential store in the space that closed in 2018, shortly after opening. The NFL’s rent would have been $8.25M per year at the time of the underwriting, Commercial Observer reported.
Natixis financed the deal for Maefield and Fortress Investment Group to buy out its investors and take full ownership of the property in 2018, and Maefield’s lease in its own property was put up as collateral. But after Maefield and Fortress defaulted on leasehold debt, Natixis and a group of overseas investors foreclosed on the property. SL Green was chosen by the lender to manage the 350K SF building at auction this year, with plans to reopen the building’s hotel portion.
Roughly $150M of mezzanine debt is also owed on the property to a collection of lenders that includes institutional Korean investors and Korean banks KB Kookmin, Hana and NH Nonghyup, according to reporting from the Korea Herald.
