Extell Pays $23.9M for Church Air Rights at 570 Fifth Ave

Extell Development has agreed to pay $23.93 million for nearly 87,000 square feet of air rights from the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, a landmarked Episcopal parish at 145 West 46th Street, to add buildable area to its planned office and retail tower at 570 Fifth Avenue. The purchase and sale agreement, dated December 2025, was submitted to the New York Supreme Court for the approval churches must obtain before transferring real estate, with sign-off sought from the parish’s board of trustees, the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York, and Bishop Matthew Foster Heyd. Gary Barnett’s firm did not respond to a request for comment, and neither the diocese nor its attorney did either, Commercial Observer reported. This is a distinct transaction from Extell’s financed Park Avenue assemblage three blocks south, which this desk covered on September 22.

Why it matters

Air rights purchases are the entitlement step that lets a developer build bigger than its own lot would allow on its own. This one lands as Extell pushes toward a 2028 delivery for 570 Fifth Avenue, where Simpson Thacher & Bartlett has signed a 916,000-square-foot office lease and Ingka Investments, IKEA’s parent, plans an 80,000-square-foot store at the base. The church sits one block west of the tower site. For developers assembling buildable area near landmarked religious properties, the deal shows a parish’s remaining air rights are a finite, sellable asset, and that court approval, not a simple deed, is the gating step once a diocese has already sold part of its allotment elsewhere.

The numbers

The $23.93 million price for nearly 87,000 square feet works out to roughly $275 per square foot of buildable air rights, a figure not stated in the original coverage. That is the church’s remaining allotment: it previously sold about 131,000 square feet of air rights to the Durst Organization for the neighboring 114 West 47th Street tower, so between the two deals the parish appears to have monetized its full transferable square footage. Extell has assembled the 570 Fifth Avenue site from more than a dozen parcels over several decades; the project was once planned as a 78-story supertall and has since been downsized.

What’s next

No ACRIS deed has been identified for this transfer yet, since the agreement is still moving through New York Supreme Court approval rather than a straight recorded sale, and Commercial Observer’s filing-based report did not give an exact submission date. The next verifiable step is either the court’s approval order or a recorded zoning lot merger/easement document naming both the church’s and Extell’s parcels; this desk will check ACRIS for that filing once the approval clears. Delivery of the 570 Fifth Avenue tower itself is still projected for the end of 2028.