Google Buys Chelsea Market Building for $3bn

Alphabet Inc’s Google has agreed to pay USD$2.4 billion ($3.07 billion) for a significant site on 75 Ninth Avenue.

The iconic Chelsea Market building is a 111,483sq m office and retail property, and sits across the street from Google’s New York headquarters, 111 Eight Avenue – which is acquired for $1.8 billion in 2010. Google is already the Chelsea Market building’s largest tenant, taking up 37,161sq m of space.

The tech giant has declined to comment on the acquisition, but The Real Deal broke the news, with two anonymous Google executives spilling the beans to the real estate publication.

Google is expected to keep the status quo for the building’s retail component, but has been “muscling out” the other tenants by attempting to expand throughout the building every time a tenant’s lease comes up for renewal.

It seems likely that Google is lining up to establish a brand new exclusively-tenanted headquarters.

Related reading: Bloomberg Opens New £1 Billion European Headquarters

The $3 billion price tag represents the second largest deal in all of New York and only the fifth in the history of Manhattan to cross the $2 billion threshold in an outright sale.

The tech investment in New York has some people concerned about a potential monopoly in the city as giants like Google buy up and completely occupy office space.

Amazon, Facebook and Spotify are all expanding rapidly in New York as employment at technology firms grows by three times the amount of the remainder of the private sector.

At the end of 2017, technology firms accounted for 8 percent of New York office space compared to 5 per cent nine years ago.