More Manhattan Real Estate sold to Foreign Buyer

Demonstrating the effect of a weak Dollar and a strong Euro, one of Manhattan’s long time iconic buildings has just been sold to a foreign purchaser. The Flatiron building.

Italian businessman, Valter Mainetti has confirmed that his company, the Sorgente Group, has acquired a majority share of Manhattan’s historic Flatiron building (53% I understand.)

The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham in the Beaux-Arts style and was one of the tallest buildings in New York when it was completed in 1902. Originally called the Fuller building, its limestone and glazed terra-cotta façade is separated into three parts horizontally. Since it was one of the first buildings to use a steel skeleton, the building could be constructed to 285 feet (87 m), which would have been very difficult with other construction methods of that time.

At the rounded tip, the triangular tower is only 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide. The 22-story building, with a height of 285 ft (87 meters), is often considered the oldest surviving skyscraper in Manhattan, though in fact the Park Row Building (1899) is both older and taller.

New York’s Flatiron Building is not the first building of its type. It is the third building in the flatiron shape, with the first being the Gooderham Building of Toronto, built in 1892, and the second in Atlanta in 1897. Both of which are smaller than their New York counterpart. If it’s in NY it better be big.

We certainly wonder how much of the top-end U.S. real estate will remain in American hands with the current state of the dollar. Foreign purchases of iconic U.S. buildings over the last few years include the Rockefeller center and Essex House. According to “Real Estate Alert,” foreign companies were the buyers in four of the top 13 U.S. commercial real estate deals in 2007.

It certainly makes sense to market properties to buyers with money to spend and the only real question is whether you should be learning to speak Arabic, Russian or Italian first?