COVID-19 Pandemic

3 Months Ended

Mar. 31, 2020

Unusual or Infrequent Items, or Both [Abstract]

In December 2019, a novel strain of coronavirus (“COVID-19”) was identified in Wuhan, China and by March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization had declared it a global pandemic. Many states in the U.S., including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California have implemented stay-at-home orders for all "non-essential" business and activity in an aggressive effort to curb the spread of the virus. Consequently, the U.S. economy has suffered and there has been significant volatility in the financial markets. Many U.S. industries and businesses have been negatively affected and millions of people have filed for unemployment.

Our properties, which are concentrated in New York City, and in Chicago and San Francisco, have been adversely affected as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive measures taken to curb the spread. Some of the effects on us include the following:


•	With the exception of grocery stores and other "essential" businesses, substantially all of our retail tenants have closed their stores and many are seeking rent relief.


•	While our office buildings remain open, substantially all of our office tenants are working remotely.


•	We have temporarily closed the Hotel Pennsylvania.


•	We have postponed trade shows at theMART for the remainder of 2020.


•	Because certain of our development projects are deemed "non-essential," they have been temporarily paused due to New York State executive orders.


•	Closings on the sale of condominium units at 220 Central Park South have continued. During April 2020 we closed on the sale of four condominium units for net proceeds of $157,747,000. However, future closings may be temporarily delayed to the extent we cannot complete the buildout and obtain temporary certificates of occupancy on time.


•	We placed 1,803 employees on temporary furlough, including 1,293 employees of Building Maintenance Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary, which provides cleaning, security and engineering services primarily to our New York properties, 414 employees at the Hotel Pennsylvania and 96 corporate staff employees.


•	Effective April 1, 2020, our executive officers waived portions of their annual base salary for the remainder of 2020.


•	Effective April 1, 2020, each non-management member of our Board of Trustees agreed to forgo his or her $75,000 annual cash retainer for the remainder of 2020.

We have collected substantially all of the rent due for March 2020 and collected 90% of rent due from our office tenants for the month of April 2020 and 53% of the rent due from our retail tenants for the month of April 2020, or 83% in the aggregate. Many of our retail tenants and some of our office tenants have requested rent relief and/or rent deferral for April 2020 and beyond. While we believe that our tenants are required to pay rent under their leases, we have implemented and will continue to consider temporary rent deferrals on a case-by-case basis.