Commercial Real Estate

A few weeks ago developer Lawrence Omansky closed on the purchase of almost an entire square block in Red Hook, and his plans for the parcels involve building a lot of new space for commercial and light industry tenants. Omansky, whose firm is called Dragon Hearth Realty, bought all but one of the properties in the block bounded by Dikeman, Otsego, Dwight, and Coffey streets, and he intends to build 14 low-rise townhouses that will be leased to small manufacturing firms or artists and some additional retail space in the ground floors of the buildings. The three extant buildings on the site, pictured on the jump, will not be knocked down, and since they’ve been grandfathered in for residential uses, will stay as such. “I’m very excited about this project, because it will be attractive to artists and it’ll also be very close to the new IKEA,” says Omansky, who believes that the future retail in the properties will be driven by what customers leaving IKEA would want for amenities (for example, restaurants or more home supply/hardware stores). Omansky intends to build about five townhouses in each stage of the project’s construction, which he hopes to start very soon. As sketched above, the finished product will also have a 12,000-square-foot communal courtyard for the buildings’ tenants to use. Frank Galeano, who has been a broker in Red Hook for the past seven years, handled the sale of the properties. Galeano says the site’s proximity to IKEA and the fact that it was a rare large parcel in Red Hook both contributed significantly to the property’s lure. GMAP