Jamison Commercial and Cahn family plan West Chelsea office condo conversion

Jamison Commercial RE and Cahn Family Associates LLC are redeveloping 510-514 W. 27th St., a six-story warehouse and textile building in Manhattan's West Chelsea Arts District, into a boutique office property with a for-sale component. The Cahn family's textile business has owned and occupied the building for more than 40 years, and it will remain involved in the project while continuing to occupy part of the building for the foreseeable future, according to Connect CRE.

The program covers 51,400 square feet in near-identical plates: a ground floor of about 7,500 square feet, five rentable floors of roughly 8,500 square feet each, and a 1,400-square-foot penthouse. The sponsor plans to create a for-sale commercial condominium and offer the top four floors as a combined acquisition, with the owners also envisioning a division into individual full-floor units and, for whatever does not sell, leases.

Selling floors rather than leasing them shifts the leasing risk to the buyer and prices the space off what an owner-occupier will pay per foot instead of off a rent roll. At 8,500 square feet a plate, that buyer is likely a single company or a family rather than the multi-tenant institutional tenant a landlord would court, and the more than 100 feet of frontage on the High Line is doing much of the work. Keeping the full-floor alternative and the leasing fallback in the plan suggests the sponsors are not assuming the package moves quickly. For the Cahn family, the structure turns part of a four-decade holding into saleable floors while leaving the textile business in place.

Davis Architecture and DeSimone Consulting Engineering will design a comprehensive renovation of the existing structure, from a restored and redesigned facade to a landscaped rooftop outdoor space. A new floor may be added at the top, subject to governmental approvals, which would carry the finished program past the 51,400 square feet now planned. Jamison Commercial RE, which is also co-developing the project, will lead sales and leasing through its brokerage division. Principal Jamison Weiner said in a statement that direct High Line frontage, full-floor occupancy, light and views will allow a distinctive boutique property for companies and owners seeking a lasting presence in the neighborhood.

Whether one buyer takes the roughly 34,000 square feet on offer or four buyers take a floor apiece is the clearest test of what West Chelsea will bear for owner-occupied space at this plate size.