Times To Mortgage Its House
Layoffs and dividend cuts apparently aren't enough to get the New York Times Company out of the financial woods. The Times reports the company plans to mortgage or sell (and lease back) part of its shiny new Renzo Piano headquarters building, which cost half a billion dollars to build. It assigned Cushman & Wakefield the tricky task of finding someone willing to take a $225 million chance on a company whose debt is rated junk in a down market. The Times Company's timing is, once again, atrocious: The price of its old headquarters building tripled between when the company sold it in 2004 and three years later, when the newspaper finally moved into its new headquarters. That extra $350 million would sure come in handy now.