Brokers Randy Modell, Steven Hornstock and Gregg Schenker were canvassing the Upper East Side for business when they noticed a building on Third Avenue looking out of place among the neighborhood’s tall towers.
They approached the owner of the seven-story multifamily property, a European family that had been looking to sell it as a rental. The brokers had a different idea.
They convinced the owner to divide the building into two pieces by rerouting pipes and electrical wiring. Then, over a seven-year period, they relocated 17 rent-stabilized tenants to the renovated half of the building so they could market the other half as a development site.
“We realized if you could obtain possession of five or six different lines of units that half the building could literally be demolished while the other half stands,” Modell said. “And the part that’s demolished, you could then rebuild as a luxury building.”
The result — the $124.5 million sale of 1450 Third Avenue and 140,000-square-feet of air rights to Jeffrey Levine’s Douglaston Development — earned the brokers commercial real estate’s top prize for deal-making Wednesday night. The multifamily building was New York’s first to be split and partially demolished.
“We told the client exactly what we would do for ourselves if we owned the building,” Modell said.
Hundreds of the industry’s biggest dealmakers gathered at Lever House in Midtown for their version of the Oscars, the Real Estate Board of New York’s 81st annual Most Ingenious Deal of the Year Awards. Power brokers Mary Ann Tighe, Bruce Mosler and Barry Gosin mingled as waiters weaved through the crowd with platters of tuna tartare.
The second-place award went to CBRE’s Tighe and Lauren Crowley Corrinet for three deals to relocate Sotheby’s auction house. Savills’ Geoffrey Newman received third place for the sale of a former Murray Hill church site at 40 East 35th Street to Ian Bruce Eichner’s Continuum Company.
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