Chase Bought the 160 Riverside Loan and Added $9.2M

A $295,000,000 agreement between 160 Riverside Boulevard, LLC and JPMorgan Chase Bank was recorded against the 455-unit Upper West Side rental on August 26. Three documents recorded in the same batch show what it is. Chase took an assignment of the existing mortgage from Square Mile Capital’s lending entities, recorded a new $9,200,000 mortgage, and consolidated the two. The arithmetic is exact: $285,800,000 plus $9,200,000 is $295,000,000.

Why it matters

Reported as a number, this is a $295 million refinancing on a marquee Manhattan rental, and it reads as a large bank writing a large multifamily check. Read as instruments, $9.2 million of new capital moved and an existing loan changed owner. Those are different facts about the lending market, and only the second one is true here. An owner watching for evidence that bank balance sheets have reopened for New York multifamily should not count this deal as that evidence.

It is also the second time in one month we have found this shape in the records. A $110,081,316.47 agreement on RXR’s 530 Fifth Avenue office condominium, recorded five days later, was likewise an assignment of an existing loan rather than a new one. Two documents are not a trend, and we are not calling one. They are enough to say that reading the instrument rather than the headline number is currently changing the answer.

The numbers

The building at 160 Riverside Boulevard, one of the former Riverside South rentals, was bought from EQR-160 Riverside, LLC for $415,000,000 in a deed recorded August 4, 2022, financed the same day with a $285,800,000 mortgage from SM Finance II LLC and SM Finance III LLC. That loan moved through a chain of Square Mile warehouse entities across 2022. On August 26 it was assigned to Chase, Square Mile’s assignment of leases and rents was terminated, and the new consolidated lien was set at $295,000,000.

Against the 2022 purchase price, the new lien is 71.1%. Against the 455 apartments in city land records, it is $648,352 a unit.

What’s next

Watch whether Chase holds this or syndicates it, which the record will show as a further assignment. Watch too for the same pattern in the next large multifamily number reported as a refinancing. For the office-side version of the same structure, see Macquarie’s purchase of the 530 Fifth Avenue loan and the New York market.