Israel's Biggest Real Estate Company To Buy TriBeCa Building

By Bloomberg News
October 11, 2007

Industrial Buildings Corp., Israel's biggest real estate company, said its overseas unit and a partner agreed to buy a 19th-century building in Lower Manhattan for $23 million.

The Herzlia, Israel-based company and the partner plan to invest an additional $25 million to turn the five-story building at 87 Chambers St. into a 100-room boutique hotel, a spokeswoman for Industrial Buildings. She didn't identify the partner, Shlomit Paruz, said. Industrial Buildings's unit and its partner borrowed $17 million to fund the transaction, the Israeli company said.

"This is a preserved building in one of the most attractive and developing areas in Manhattan today," the chief executive officer of Industrial Buildings, Dalit Baron, said in an e-mailed note. "This is an area where the demand for hotels in general and boutique hotels in particular is immense."

Industrial Buildings shares fell 0.09 shekels, or 0.8%, to 10.90 shekels in Tel Aviv.

The property is in one of four historic districts in New York's TriBeCa section, a swath of one-time industrial buildings that is now a popular residential area. The TriBeCa districts "provide an incomparable history of the development of commercial and industrial architecture in New York City from about 1850 through the early years of the 20th Century," according to the city's Guide to New York City Landmarks.

The Italianate-style building on Chambers Street was completed in 1856, a city Landmarks Preservation Commission spokeswoman, Elizabeth de Bourbon, said.