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In April 1993 Martin Rabinowitz suggested to his colleagues at Odyssey Partners L.P. that the firm target Manhattan office space before the rest of the market caught on to the imminent turnaround. The contrarian proposition wouldn't pay off for another year, when, in May 1994, a newly forged partnership of Odyssey and local developer Edward Minskoff agreed to purchase IBM's prestigious 530 Madison Avenue office tower for an estimated $205 million (the purchase price has never been disclosed). The sale was a watershed event for the Manhattan office market - the first speculative investment (not a purchase by an owner-operator) in a major, nondistressed midtown property since he crash.
Indeed, when IBM first contemplated disposing of the building in late 1993, it was not clear that the market had recovered sufficiently to support the sale of...