Deal gives Kushners cash infusion on 666 Fifth Ave.

The deal, in which Brookfield paid the rent for the entire 99-year term upfront, helps remove the family’s biggest financial headache: a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower due in February. The Kushners have spent more than two years on an international search for new partners or fresh financing that stretched from the Middle East to China.

The deal would enable the Kushners to pay off at least a large portion of what they owe lenders and retain ownership of the land beneath the tower. But they may not make any money from it.

While the deal relieves some of the Kushners’ troubles, difficulties persist across their real estate empire, at least in part because of their connection to the White House. “If you do business with the Kushners, there’s a headline reality,” said Kenneth Pasternak, executive chairman of the real estate firm KABR Group and an investing partner of the Kushner family in multiple developments. “I don’t want to say it’s a headline risk,” he added. “There’s a headline reality.”

In the 666 Fifth Ave. deal, Brookfield paid about $1.1 billion in upfront rent, according to an executive who requested anonymity because he had been briefed on the deal but was not authorized to discuss it. Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, who now runs the company, in turn, negotiated with his lenders to pay less than the company owed to satisfy the debts, the executive said.

Analysts have long said that 666 Fifth was worth less than its debts. The building was 30 percent vacant and only generated about half the annual mortgage payments. In recent months, the building’s largest remaining tenant, Millennium Management, signaled that it too planned to leave.

A spokeswoman for Kushner Cos. declined to comment on the Brookfield deal.

The purchase of the aluminum-clad tower was intended to vault the Kushners into the top ranks of New York real estate from their perch in New Jersey, where they were known for a huge portfolio of garden apartment complexes. They moved their company headquarters to 666 Fifth, from where they presided over a new and rapidly expanding empire that included former industrial buildings in Brooklyn, apartments in Maryland and development sites in Jersey City, New Jersey.

But they ran into trouble almost immediately. They were unable to get the office rents they expected in 2007, making it difficult to pay the initial $1.75 billion debt on the building. Then the recession hit.

Jared and Charles Kushner sold 666 Fifth’s most valuable asset — the Fifth Avenue retail space — for $525 million and used the proceeds to pay down some of their debt. But office rents continued to fall and two of the tower’s biggest tenants left.

That forced the Kushners to restructure their loans, and Vornado Realty Trust bought a 49.5 percent stake in the office space and gave the Kushners an $80 million high-interest loan. Vornado later bought the retail space from separate owners.

In 2016, Charles and Jared Kushner pitched a new deal to investors in the United States and abroad: They would demolish the building and erect a $7.5 billion luxury supertower in its place. They got close to a deal with a billionaire from Qatar, Hamad Jassim Al-Thani, the country’s former prime minister, and with Anbang, a giant Chinese insurance company.

But the deal with the Chinese collapsed amid criticism from legislators over the connection between Jared Kushner’s political role and the family business.

Earlier this year, Brookfield said it would buy a 49.5 percent stake in the office portion of 666 Fifth, although Brookfield planned to oversee renovations and management of the tower. But that deal required the Kushner Cos. to pay off the mortgage on the office portion of the building and pay back Vornado.

In negotiations with his lenders, the executive familiar with the deal said, Jared Kushner argued that 666 Fifth was not worth the $1.4 billion that was owed. He eventually worked out an agreement to pay off the debts for substantially less, according to the executive.

But they still could not secure financing, and on Friday, Brookfield, which owns and operates more than 275 office buildings worldwide, said that it had taken the 99-year lease instead. The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Also on Friday, Vornado announced that it had sold its stake in the office portion of the building to the Kushners for $120 million.

While the deal solves a major problem for the Kushners, the company still faces challenges. Lenders continue to hesitate or retreat from doing business with the company, cowed by the scrutiny that other financial partners have received.

Early this year, the French bank Natixis, which had lent hundreds of millions of dollars to Kushner Cos. before Trump’s inauguration, abruptly canceled plans to provide a roughly $200 million new loan to 65 Bay St., an upscale apartment building in Jersey City, in which the Kushners and KABR were partners. The withdrawal was a surprise, said Pasternak, the KABR executive chairman. “They backed out late,” said Pasternak, who declined to provide further details.

In a statement, Natixis said that while it had done deals with Kushner Cos. between 2013 and 2016, it “no longer has any exposure or active business relationship with Kushner Companies.” Officials there declined to comment on the Jersey City transaction.

Natixis was quickly replaced in the 65 Bay St. deal by Citigroup. But even there, senior executives are now reassessing their involvement with the Kushner firm, say two people with knowledge of the discussions, given the blowback they have received over recent deals with the company.

A loan Citigroup made to the Kushners after its chief executive, Michael Corbat, met with Jared Kushner at the White House last year raised questions about potential conflicts of interest between Citigroup’s policy agenda and its willingness to lend to Kushner’s family business. Shortly after The New York Times wrote about the meeting that preceded the loan, Elizabeth Warren and other Senate Democrats suggested that the confluence of the meeting and the loan might constitute a federal ethics violation on Kushner’s part. Warren and her colleagues have sought additional information.

Danielle Romero-Apsilos, a Citigroup spokeswoman, has said that Kushner Cos. is a longtime client of the bank, that the meeting Corbat had with Kushner had no connection to the loan made shortly afterward, and that every deal is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

Chris Taylor, a spokeswoman for Kushner Cos., said, “It is very well known in the marketplace that Natixis is a very unreliable lender. Kushner has a strong relationship with Citi for decades and continues to have a very close relationship.”

At 666 Fifth Ave., Brookfield is betting on a turnaround based on the building’s premier location, near Rockefeller Center and Central Park, and its access to public transportation. The company plans to spend about $700 million renovating the lobby, installing new elevators, refurbishing the vacant office space and attracting new tenants.

“666 Fifth Avenue has the potential to be one of New York City’s most iconic and successful office properties,” Ric Clark, chairman of Brookfield Property Group, said in a statement Friday. “Given Brookfield’s experience in successfully redeveloping and repositioning major office assets in New York and other cities around the world, we are well placed to capitalize on that opportunity.”

Brookfield is one of the world’s biggest real estate companies. Among its investors is the Qatar Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign funds, which bought a $1.8 billion stake in a subsidiary, Brookfield Property Partners, in 2014, and is the second-largest investor in the company, ranking only behind Brookfield Asset Management. That has raised questions given Jared Kushner’s portfolio in the White House, which includes the Middle East.

Brookfield has said that the Qataris had no knowledge of the deal before its public announcement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Deal gives Kushners cash infusion on 666 Fifth Ave.

Jared Kushner, now a top White House adviser, paid a record-setting $1.8 billion for the building in 2007, and it has been a drag on his family’s real estate company ever since.

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