GM looking to refinance Detroit headquarters

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Corp is looking for support from Detroit city pension officials to refinance its Detroit headquarters and could possibly sell it, but has no plans to move from the iconic building.

GM is meeting with Detroit's police and fire pension board this week to seek money for the building known as the Renaissance Center, GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson said Tuesday.

"We have been looking for options to monetize the asset," Wilkinson said. "This particular deal is probably a long shot because the deal we'd like to do on the building is way more than they would typically have to invest."

Wilkinson would not say how much money GM is seeking. The automaker would consider a sale of the building as one of the options, he added.

"We might do a sale and lease back," he said, adding that GM has no plans to leave the building.

GM moved into the Renaissance Center -- which has seven interconnected towers with many restaurants and a hotel -- in 1996 and had been leasing it until May, when it purchased the building for $625 million.

The move comes as GM looks to cut $10 billion in costs to shore up cash and is readying asset sales. It already has put its Hummer SUV brand up for sale as part of its goal to raise $4 billion in asset sales to ride out a brutal downturn in U.S. sales.

Through September, GM's U.S. sales were down about 17.6 percent, a deeper decline than the 12.8 percent drop for the industry as a whole.

(Reporting by Poornima Gupta, editing by Maureen Bavdek)