Aalto57, a 57-story mixed-use tower in Midtown East, has quietly been put up for sale, creating a rare opening for buyers who want a newer, fully market-rate rental building in Manhattan. The offering covers only the rental portion of the high-rise, while the upper floors are a separate condominium that is not included in the deal. The timing lines up with asking rents in Manhattan and Midtown East sitting near multi-year highs, which has big, income-heavy assets with strong retail components squarely on investor radar.
Jones Lang LaSalle has been tapped to market the leasehold interest at 1065 Second Avenue. The firm pitches Aalto57 as a 100% fair-market mixed-use property with 169 apartments stacked above roughly 66,513 square feet of large-format retail space. The marketing package highlights a PILOT tax abatement that runs through May 2035 and notes the retail is about 95% leased, with a long-running Whole Foods as the anchor tenant. The listing is being handled by brokers Rob Hinckley, Jeffrey Julien, Steven Rutman and Drew Isaacson, according to JLL.
Industry data show the property’s average market asking rent sits around $6,908 per unit, which is well above the record-high average for the Midtown East cluster and far above the citywide asking-rent average. The market-rate apartments at Aalto57 are roughly 98% occupied. Research firm CoStar notes that the tower is one of only a handful of post-2016, 150-unit-plus, fully market-rate rental buildings currently for sale, and the only one of its kind in midtown Manhattan. That scarcity makes the asset an unusually prized target for institutional buyers, according to CoStar.
The broader rental backdrop is not exactly making things less interesting. Realtor.com’s Q1 2026 report pegs the citywide median asking rent at about $3,616, with Manhattan’s median landing around $4,878, numbers that have amplified demand for high-quality, market-rate product. Researchers say the widening gap between what many long-term tenants currently pay and today’s asking rents is increasingly shaping both housing policy debates and investor decision-making. Those trends are outlined in the quarterly snapshot from Realtor.com.
Income stability and tax breaks
Marketing materials lean hard on the story of stable income. The lower floors of Aalto57 are devoted to large-format retail that provides a significant share of the building’s net operating income and is roughly 95% leased, with Whole Foods in place as a long-dated anchor tenant. The PILOT program offers substantial tax savings through May 2035, a feature the brokers say should appeal to buyers looking for predictable near-term yields in an otherwise high-cost Manhattan environment. These details come from the sale materials distributed by JLL.
On the ownership side, Oxford Properties is listed as the current landlord and, as CoStar has reported, bought the building for about $280 million in 2018. Oxford highlights Aalto57 as one of its notable New York residential holdings, giving the tower an institutional pedigree. At the same time, CoStar points out that investor enthusiasm for rentals has to be weighed against rising political pressure on rent-stabilized stock and proposals to freeze rents, which can cool interest in regulated portfolios even as market-rate buildings like Aalto57 fetch premium pricing. Those observations are drawn from CoStar.
For Midtown East, a completed sale would effectively serve as a test case for how the market currently values newer, large-scale, market-rate rental towers in a tight supply environment with evolving policy risk. A short list of institutional players is expected to comb through the numbers, weighing the strength of the retail income and the tax benefits against potential regulatory headwinds. Where bids ultimately land could offer an early read on the next chapter of Manhattan’s rental cycle.
