RFR Holding wants to extend its stay at a SoHo hotel.
The embattled developer, which a judge in October evicted from the Chrysler Building over missed payments to a partner, is trying to stave off a similar fate at posh inn 11 Howard.
RFR, which remodeled the former Holiday Inn at Lafayette Street into the luxury lodging and operates the 207-room site through a lease today, is accused of failing to pay more than $8 million in rent, taxes and furniture expenses to landlord Commerz Real since 2023, according to court filings.
Earlier this month Commerz, a German asset management firm, told RFR that its lease would be terminated as of Tuesday, according to a letter that was part of the filings.
But RFR does not seem ready to depart willingly. In fact the firm, whose co-founder is Aby Rosen, has struck back with accusations of its own. On Wednesday it sued Commerz for allegedly reneging on an agreement to give RFR first dibs on the 14-story, restaurant-lined, prewar property if Commerz ever decided to sell, according to its complaint in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court.
The agreement, which is indeed spelled out in the 2016 lease RFR submitted in the case, was specifically violated in November 2023, the suit claims. That’s when Commerz executives allegedly invited some “commercial real estate industry businesspeople” it had met at a trade show in Germany to spend the night at 11 Howard and look over the place with the intention of purchasing it.
But “they were no ordinary guests,” the suit says. “They inspected the bones of the premises—examining fixtures, engineering and mechanical elements, rooms, back rooms, event spaces and other areas.”
Along the same lines, the suit also accuses Commerz of trying to muscle RFR aside to clear a path for a deal. Indeed, Commerz booked the stay for the supposed buyers just two days after sending RFR its first notice about the rent default, which warned that Commerz would cancel RFR’s lease if the developer did not immediately pay up.
The would-be buyers seemed to have taken a pass, based on a lack of a deed in the city register. But for RFR, the hotel seems to have remained out of grasp. When the firm did finally get around to offering to buy the 113,000-square-foot property, on Jan. 6 of this year, Commerz “played hardball” and told RFR that it would instead scrap its lease in 15 days, RFR’s suit says.
The developer, which is currently entangled in a slew of cases involving alleged defaults on loan and tax payments, is asking the court to allow it to stay on at 11 Howard until its lease expires in 2031. RFR also wants a jury to award it an unspecified amount for damages, court papers show.
In 2014 RFR bought 11 Howard St. for $89.7 million and flipped it to Commerz two years later for $170 million, based on the register. Along the way, the developer spent “tens of millions of dollars” to improve the building by turning a former “low-quality, blighted inn” into a “premiere destination,” the suit says.
The hotel, whose rooms start around $210 a night this month, also features the chandelier-draped restaurant Le Coucou and Latin seafood lounge La Rubia. (A concierge at the hotel also reportedly played a key role in boosting the guise of socialite grifter Anna Delvey, who shacked up at 11 Howard for months.)
Owner of Midtown’s Seagram Building and the Financial District’s 17 State St., RFR was ordered to leave the Chrysler Building after falling behind on rent to the college Cooper Union, which owns the land under the Art Deco skyscraper. But RFR has apparently refused to vacate, and the case awaits a judge’s ruling.
RFR may have halted a foreclosure proceeding against 17 State after securing a three-year extension on its loan at the 42-story spire late last month.
In the 11 Howard dispute, Commerz has not yet filed a response, and no one answered the phone at the company’s New York office in Battery Park City Tuesday. Also Michael Haworth, a DLA Piper attorney who has previously represented Commerz in its dealing with RFR there, did not return an email for comment.
In addition Sean Burstyn, the Miami-based lawyer behind RFR’s suit, did not return a call. And an RFR spokeswoman could not be reached by press time.
