Brooklyn Gets a New Mega-Landlord
The ink’s still drying on one of the largest apartment portfolio sales of the year, but the deal will soon affect hundreds of Brooklyn tenants. As the New York Sun reported in June, New Jersey-based Urban American Management agreed to pay around $250 million to buy close to 2,000 apartments in Brooklyn and Queens from…
The ink’s still drying on one of the largest apartment portfolio sales of the year, but the deal will soon affect hundreds of Brooklyn tenants. As the New York Sun reported in June, New Jersey-based Urban American Management agreed to pay around $250 million to buy close to 2,000 apartments in Brooklyn and Queens from the LeFrak Organization. The sale, dubbed the Kings & Queens portfolio, is just now hitting public records, and it includes at least 774 Brooklyn units in nine buildings. The bulk of those buildings—which fetched $88 million—are in Brownsville, Flatbush and Flatlands. And because the city hasn’t yet recorded the full portfolio sale, the price tag for the Brooklyn buildings could easily top $100 million. Buyer Urban American is a relatively new player on the city’s real estate scene, but it’s recently had a voracious appetite for rental buildings in the five boroughs: In May, the company purchased $940 million worth of Manhattan apartment buildings. If nothing else, the Kings & Queens sale shows that at least one deep-pocketed firm is betting on heavy returns from neighborhoods that haven’t quite succumbed to gentrification’s thrall.
Your building have a new owner? On the jump, a list of the Brooklyn properties Urban American’s already closed on.
Investors Compare Manhattan Buildings With T-Bills [NY Sun]
LeFraks Selling Brooklyn, Queens Portfolio for $250 M [NY Observer]
Harlem Parcels Are Bought for $940 Million [NY Observer]
Property Shark photos by Nicholas Strini
1115 Willmohr Street; Sale Price=$7,445,300 GMAP P*Shark
450 Rockaway Parkway; Sale Price=$8,902,240 GMAP P*Shark
2021 E 41st Street; Sale Price=$5,533,811 GMAP P*Shark
3900 Kings Highway; Sale Price=$9,764,091 GMAP P*Shark
665 New York Avenue; Sale Price=$12,191,307 GMAP P*Shark
4411 Church Avenue; Sale Price=$10,272,474 GMAP P*Shark
1145 E 35th Street; Sale Price=$9,488,737 GMAP P*Shark
333 East 93rd Street; Sale Price=$14,325,700 GMAP P*Shark
3502 Kings Highway; Sale Price=$9,668,930 GMAP P*Shark
This may not be an important issue to brownstone neighborhoods right now, but the long term motivations of this group do have significance to us all.
That’s a lot of money tied up into all of those properties. If they are a group whose goals are to provide decent housing to lower income renters, and plan on keeping their properties in good shape, and their rents affordable, then they are the good guys.
If, however, they are just warehousing the buildings, waiting for the inevitable wave of gentrification, then the people in those buildings are in for a rude awakening. Historically, those types of landlords are notorious for doing nothing to keep up the properties, let alone make improvements. Their tenants usually spend winters calling 311, freezing or getting killed in fires caused by space heaters and open ovens. Water damage, falling plaster, rats, roaches and all of the other urban horrors then follow.
I don’t know anything about this organization, and I hope they are the former, not the latter, type of landlords. We all suffer from the latter, in terms of the misery of our fellow humans, homelessness and horror, and in financial terms, as our taxes have to pay for the repairs, first responders, social workers and police. It’s much easier to just do the right thing in the first place.