Price Discovery.

An abysmal $8.5 million isn't that bad.

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“Price discovery” in commercial real estate doesn’t get a whole lot worse than it did this past  week in New York. On Wednesday a glass-clad, 23-story office building in Midtown Manhattan sold for an abysmal $8.5 million.

It sold on the online auction site Ten-X, where anybody with a free account can bid, and the typical offerings are treeless industrial parks, shuttered fast-food joints and motels far from any tourist attractions. It was such a comedown for a gleaming Manhattan high-rise to be put on the block at Ten-X that The New York Times assigned a reporter to cover the event. He observed that the $8.5 million bid was the only bid received, even though the auction’s time window was extended three times. The seller, UBS Realty Investors, had to change its parameters at the last minute to accept such a low bid. It had resorted to Ten-X only after trying unsuccessfully to sell the building through conventional brokerage.

The buyer’s identity will be unknown until the sale closes, probably in about 45 days. The building stands at 135 West 50th Street, a stone’s throw from Radio City Music Hall. It measures nearly one million square feet and once boasted household-name tenants like Sports Illustrated and Verizon.

And now it’s about two-thirds vacant and it seems you almost couldn’t give it away. Is the long-awaited urban doom loop finally at hand? 

Probably not.