On Tuesday, July 22, Fordham officially purchased the old College Entrance Examination Board building at 45 Columbus Avenue, across the street from Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC), for a total of $49.6 million.

According to Dr. Brian J. Byrne, vice president of FCLC, the buy serves two main purpose, convenience and consolidation. 

“This will help students by pulling services closer to campus and by consolidating. It will save us money in the long run once we get rid of the three other leases we have,” Byrne said. According to Byrne, most of Fordham’s leases expire within two years.

FCLC currently leases three other locations in Manhattan: 1790 Broadway, which houses a division of the School of Business; 33 West 60th Street, now utilized by career services, disability services and the communications and media studies department, formerly the home to sections of Fordham Law; and 888 Seventh Avenue home to the University’s business and development department. 

“Commercial real estate in NYC is just going up, so we had to get out of that. We sort of grew into this by necessity,” Byrne said. 

By shedding this extra financial weight, the university estimates they will save anywhere between $3 million to $5 million a year.

Furthermore, according to Byrne, Fordham has invested roughly $350 million in the development of this campus in the last three years, expanding the campus by about 60 percent.

Fordham is not planning on acquiring any additional space. 

“I’m trying to tell my thousands of close friends in the real estate brokerage field that we are out of the buying mode and for the time being we are out of the new building mode,” Byrne said.

We need to take a little bit of a breather and work out the kinks and advantages…Eventually, we will build the master plan out, but we have the first big chunk of it done,” he explained. 

Fordham announced its plans to purchase the property this past January and should be accessible to the University in April of 2015. 

Byrne explained, “The building is in very good shape and it comes with the furniture, so I suspect the move would be the summer of 2015, maybe earlier but it all depends on when they move out.”

As for the three other properties Fordham currently occupies, Byrne foresees little to no difficulty selling, as there has been, “a lot of interest in all three properties.”