Sotheby’s has failed to pay a $10.2 million commission on the sale of its longtime New York headquarters, the real estate company Cushman and Wakefield claims in a new lawsuit.
The global brokerage firm filed a lawsuit against the auction house in New York State Supreme Court on April 9, documents show. The Real Deal first reported the news. The allegations stem from Sotheby’s $510 million sale of its building at 1334 York Avenue to Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) in 2025. It ranked among the biggest real estate deals in New York last year.
Cushman and Wakefield (C&W), which had worked with the medical school for years, brokered its 30-year lease from Sotheby’s in 2023, a move that “laid the groundwork for the eventual sale of the property,” according to the complaint. Sotheby’s agreed to pay the broker a 2-percent fee of the “total sales price in the event the property was subsequently sold to WCM during the lease term,” according to court papers.
Despite “the language of the commission agreement,” the brokerage firm claims in its filing, “Sotheby’s has refused to pay C&W the $10.2 million commission it is owed, choosing instead to retain those funds to address its deteriorating financial condition to the detriment of C&W.”
Sotheby’s denied the allegations.
“This lawsuit is baseless and completely meritless,” a Sotheby’s spokesperson said in a statement. “We will defend ourselves vigorously in court and we are confident that when the facts come out, we’ll be vindicated.”
The lawsuit comes as Sotheby’s is struggling to recover from a liquidity strain caused by the art market slump that began in 2022. Recent auctions in London and Hong Kong have shown improvements, but the market is not yet in the clear.
Just this week, the Financial Times reported that Sotheby’s offered to sellers 7 percent interest “to delay paying out their sale proceeds as the auction house grapples with a cash squeeze in a poor art market.”
The 10-story, 420,000-square-foot building has been an asset and a liability over the years. Sotheby’s purchased it for $11 million in 1980, and gave it a $140-million makeover before moving in that same year, according to the suit.
In 2002, Sotheby’s sold the building for about $175 million and leased it back as a result of financial hardships caused by a 2001 price-fixing scandal that sent its former chairman to prison.
It repurchased the building in 2009 for $370 million through an affiliate, “obtaining large mortgages over the years,” including a $175 million mortgage in 2020, a year after Sotheby’s was taken private by billionaire telecom magnate Patrick Drahi.
“Sotheby’s looked for ways to escape this massive financial burden,” the lawsuit claims.
Sotheby’s building attracted WCM because of its proximity to the school’s main campus, its affiliate New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and new residential tower on East 74th Street, according to court documents.
Meanwhile, Sotheby’s was in the middle of reconfiguring its footprint. It moved some of its operations to Queens, buying the Gantry Point office building for $82 million in 2022, and it acquired the Breuer Building from the Whitney Museum of American Art for about $100 million in 2023. The company moved its headquarters to the Breuer in November, inaugurating the storied space with a record-setting sale of Leonard A. Lauder‘s collection.
Cushman and Wakefield claims that Sotheby’s didn’t inform it about the sale of 1334 York, or even of the fact that it was negotiating the sale with the hospital. The company said that it learned of the deal from news reports.
Sotheby’s “interfered with C&W’s contractual rights, and deprived C&W of the benefits of the bargain including but not limited to $10.2 million Sales Commission, which is the commission from the sale of the Property to WCM,” the brokerage firm claims.
The broker sent the invoice on October 17, 2025.