Last month's historic $5.4 billion real estate deal for Stuyvesant Town seems to have received as much attention as say the Academy Awards. And why not? The transaction was the most expensive deal for a residential property ever and it involved the largest swath of middle-income housing in New York City with approximately
11,232 units on 80 acres, approximately 77% of the units falling under rent regulation. But let's now turn our focus to smaller real estate residential transactions under $200 million that may not usually garner the attention of a deal the size of the Stuyvesant Town transaction but still deserves attention.
- Apollo Real Estate Advisors, which helped develop the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle six years ago, teamed up with Taconic Investment Partners in September to purchase 983 units for $90 million in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The deal caps an 18-month series of transactions in which Apollo has grabbed 9,500 rental units, almost all of them rent-stabilized.
- In July, Ladera Partners acquired four five-story walk-up rental buildings in Manhattan with 81 units. It paid $11.5 million, or about $142,000 a unit, to the estate of Edith Bluttal.
- Last year,
Stellar Management purchased 1,250 units in a Harlem complex called Riverton Houses for $130 million.
These moves are part of a growing trend of companies acquiring New York City rental developments for their steady income as well as possible conversion to condominiums. As for the rental income, one developer summed up his take on rent.
“You make money slowly, by improving the apartments when someone moves,” Stephen Siegel, the chairman of worldwide operations for CB Richard Ellis
said in a New York Times article. “It’s kind of like the tortoise and the hare. This is the tortoise.” — Gerald Magpily
See NY Times article
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