Wall Street Journal: The New York real-estate firm RFR Holding LLC and the Austrian real-estate firm Signa Holding GmbH signed a contract to acquire the Chrysler Building for a little more than $150 million. Tishman Speyer, which bought the building and two adjacent properties out of foreclosure in the late 1990s, initially spent $100 million in improvements on the properties. Prior to the recent sale, Tishman owned 10% of the building. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council in 2008 acquired a 90% stake for $800 million. Both firms are unloading the 77-story, classic art deco style office tower at a substantial loss. The Chrysler building faces several challenges that enabled the buyers to nab it for a fraction of the previous sales price. The tower‘s owners don’t own the ground beneath the property and pay rent on the land to the Cooper Union school. According to Cooper Union’s financial documents, the annual ground-lease rent the owners pay to the school jumped from $7.75 million to $32.5 million in 2018 and will go up to $41 million in 2028. The tower also has about 400,000 square feet of space that is vacant, or that will become available in the coming years, which could require about a $200 million investment in the building to attract new tenants.