On a Tuesday in late May, Marc Holliday signed off on a $312 million handshake. SL Green, the REIT he has led for two decades, agreed to sell 10 East 53rd Street to Meadow Partners. The 37-story, 390,000-square-foot Midtown tower is 90% occupied. The price: roughly $800 per square foot. The cap rate: mid-5%.
The deal is one of the largest office building sales in Manhattan this year. It is also the latest data point in SL Green's plan, announced in December, to sell $2.5 billion of commercial and residential assets. CFO Matthew DiLiberto framed the strategy bluntly: "selling assets [and] losing [income] to fight against interest rates that are too high."
SL Green bought the building in 2012 for $252.5 million, or $647 per square foot. It brought in the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a partner. In 2024, SL Green bought out CPPIB's stake at a $236 million valuation. The $312 million sale price represents a 32% gain over that buyout valuation and a 24% gain over the original purchase price.
The buyer is Meadow Partners, a New York- and London-focused firm run by founders Jeffrey Kaplan, Andrew McDaniel, and Tim Yantz. Meadow raised a $530 million fund in 2024 to target deals in both cities. The firm has been active in preferred equity: a $62 million injection into 51 Astor Place earlier this year and a $36 million preferred stake in 1166 Sixth Avenue last year.
Tenants at 10 East 53rd include Compass and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. The 90% occupancy rate is above the Manhattan office average, which per CBRE data hovered around 85% in Q1 2026. The mid-5% cap rate reflects a market that has repriced but not collapsed for well-located, well-leased Class A assets.
The sale is part of a broader SL Green disposition pipeline. In January, the REIT sold a 49% stake in 100 Park Avenue to Rockpoint at a $425 million valuation. In March, it sold 690 Madison Avenue for $55 million to the parent company of Van Cleef & Arpels. It also sold the 209-unit rental building at 7 Dey Street to GO Residential for $223 million. Last week, SL Green sold a 49% stake in the planned 46-story office tower at 346 Madison Avenue to Japan's Mori Building Company at a $175 million valuation.
The pace of sales is deliberate. SL Green is not fire-selling. The $312 million price for 10 East 53rd is above the $236 million valuation at which it bought out CPPIB just two years ago. The REIT is harvesting liquidity from assets that have held value while shedding exposure to a rate environment that shows no sign of easing.
Interest rates have been climbing since the start of the Iran War in late February. The 10-year Treasury yield has risen roughly 60 basis points since then, per Federal Reserve data. That trajectory threatens the broader office recovery, even as Manhattan posted its strongest year of leasing in 2025 since 2019.
Meadow Partners is betting that the repricing has gone far enough. The mid-5% cap rate on a 90%-leased Midtown tower offers a spread over risk-free rates that is historically attractive. The firm's recent preferred equity investments suggest a strategy of providing capital where banks have retreated, then acquiring assets when the math works.
The deal also signals a shift in buyer composition. Institutional capital like CPPIB exited at a $236 million valuation. Private equity and family office capital, in the form of Meadow Partners, entered at $312 million. The spread between those two numbers is the cost of waiting: the market repriced, and the buyer who acted captured the upside.
For SL Green, the calculus is clear. The REIT is trading income for balance sheet flexibility. Every asset sold reduces net operating income but also reduces recourse exposure and interest expense. DiLiberto's comment about "losing income to fight against interest rates" is not spin. It is arithmetic.
The question for the broader market is whether this trade works. If rates stabilize or decline, SL Green will have sold assets at the bottom of the cycle. If rates continue to climb, the REIT will have locked in liquidity before the next wave of distress. The answer will not come from the deal itself. It will come from the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury.
Meadow Partners now owns a 37-story tower at 10 East 53rd Street. The price was $312 million. The cap rate was mid-5%. The seller was a REIT executing a plan. The buyer was a fund deploying capital. The market will decide which side was right.