Investors looking to diversify their portfolios amid global uncertainty got a new option last week: a nondescript New York City office building is now trading publicly.
Publicly tradable units in a 18,759-square-foot office building in Harlem began trading on public markets last week, The New York Post first reported.
Units were offered for $250 and have oscillated in value in the days following the initial offering, sitting Tuesday morning right around that same value.
“The stock has been trading since Wednesday, but we haven’t publicized this at all beyond notifying our users that trading was open, which we had a duty to do,” Jesse Daugherty, co-founder and co-owner of Lex Markets, told The Post. “We … decided to close the IPO so investors could start trading.”
It’s the first time an individual building in New York has been publicly traded, according to The Post, citing Daugherty, whose company helps the owners of buildings take them public while maintaining ownership.
Lex Markets allow investors to buy units in individual properties, rather than in publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which don’t come with the same benefits as investments in individual buildings, the company says.
By mid-morning on Tuesday, just 70 units had traded hands out of 7,133 shares outstanding, Lex Markets reported. The building at 286 Lenox Avenue has an implied valuation of $11.2 million. It’s one of two publicly traded commercial buildings listed on the market as of Tuesday.
Another, a parking garage in Portland, Maine, has been trading for just over a year. Its shares have shed about 5 percent of their value since then.
Two more buildings are accepting non-binding indications of interest from investors. They include a 45-unit mixed-use building in Seattle and a 425,702-square-foot industrial warehouse in Nashua, New Hampshire.
